Help needed…Im on week 18 and I’ve come across this a few times and it’s confusing me : *We all thought that they wanted to find something - Oeddwn ni i gyd yn meddwl bo nhw isio ffeindio rhywbeth. . Could anyone clarify for me why it is nhw isio i.e. Present tense and not past tense?
Many thanks
This does confuse people – it’s not really present tense (more like an infinitive), but it doesn’t matter: there basically isn’t a contrast between present and past in the second half of the sentence, and there isn’t in English either!
In English we would say “We thought that they wanted to find something” regardless of whether they said “We want to find something” or “We wanted to find something” – the information about the tense of ‘want’ has got lost in the reported speech.
In Welsh the information gets lost, too, it’s just that the construction is different: literally, “We all thought them to be wanting to find something.”
There’s a similar example I always wind up trotting out from the King James Bible in English, where it says the two Marys saw the risen Jesus and didn’t recognise him – “thinking him to be the gardener.” They’d have said, “I think that is the gardener.” In reported speech we’d normally say “They thought that he was the gardener,” but the old-fashioned Latin-influenced English just says “to be,” and the Welsh works the same way.
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