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Does such a formulation occur in German? I was thinking that if it did then perhaps it may have a past habitual interpretation. For example, something like:

Damals wurde ich oft Äpfel essen.

Meaning something like ‘back then I would often eat apples’ (or ‘back then I often used to eat apples’.

German grammar books in English never mention such a construction, and for a form that conveys a past habitual, it is usually suggested to just use a simple past form:

Damals aß ich oft Äpfel.

After all, ‘back then I often ate apples’ would typically be understood to convey a past habitual in English also.

Still, my question is less about how to express past habitual actions or states in German, but whether constructions involving a past form of werden + infinitive even occur grammatically in German, and if so, what is their typical use?

James Wells
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    I am afraid you are confusing the past wurde and the subjunctive würde both of which are would in English. Your example "Back then I would often eat apples" is actually subjunctive and not past, and the (grammatically correct) translation is: "Damals würde ich oft Äpfel essen." Nevertheless, these sentences do not make sense to me, because of the addition "back then" / "damals" that indicates that past tense should be used. – Björn Friedrich Jun 02 '23 at 20:34
  • @BjörnFriedrich Yes, that was my question. Would constructions formed with a past tense form of werden + infinitive be grammatical? And as you indeed confirm, it isn't. The question was motivated from my noticing that I never see any reference to such a form in grammar books even though it would follow logically from the patterns set by other verbal forms. So it seemed, in a sense, to be ‘missing’. Obviously, I suspected that it wasn't ever mentioned because it just isn't grammatical, but I just wanted the view of native german speakers on the matter, since a comparable form does exist in En – James Wells Jun 02 '23 at 21:08
  • @JamesWells I noted exactly this usage in my answer as well but got ignored. – EagleFliesBanana Jun 02 '23 at 21:17
  • @EagleFliesBanana It wasn't ignored, but it wasn't what I was getting at with my question either. Of course, the subjunctive ‘_würde_’ and past ‘_wurde_’ are spelt almost the same so it's understandable that there would be uncertainty with my question whether I my have just confused the two, but nevertheless I hadn't and really was just asking specifically whether ‘wurde + infinitive’ exists in German. – James Wells Jun 02 '23 at 21:26

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No, the construction "wurde + Infinitiv" is not grammatical.*

That is one of the reasons some people don't see "werden" as a modal verb and instead argue that "werden + Infinitiv" is a tense on its own. It makes sense that one can not combine tenses; an event can't be in the past and the future at the same time.

If you wanted future in the past, you have to use "würde" + Infinitiv or "sollte" + Infinitiv.

Kolumbus glaubte, er hätte die Ostküste Indiens erreicht. Das sollte sich aber als Irrtum erweisen.

German does not mark habitual actions (and other aspects) on the verb, but rather with temporal adverbs such as "oft", "manchmal", "häufiger", "ständig", etc. Remember that German has no progressive aspect unlike English.

*: "Werden" can still mean become, but this usually makes no sense.

Dodezv
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  • Thank you for the answer. I'd be interested to know more about the argument for treating werden as a modal verb. I tend to think of it as modal, but that's mostly on account of its formal similarity with the modal verbs in German. Nevertheless, the German grammar books I'm most familiar with never treat it as such, so I'd be fascinated to learn more about the arguments for treating it as modal. – James Wells Jun 02 '23 at 12:17
  • @JamesWells It is not a modal verb. It's an auxiliary that can have modal characteristics. – EagleFliesBanana Jun 02 '23 at 18:11
  • @JamesWells If you start with the definition that "tense" is about the time something happens, you will notice that a) Präsens is the most used tense for things happening in the future and b) "werden" is also used for expectations in the present. So one could argue that the semantic difference between Präsens and Futur is mainly not in time, but rather in modality. Tense and modality are often interspersed, see Tense-Aspect-Modality(Wikipedia) – Dodezv Jun 02 '23 at 18:52
  • @Dodezv Yes, this was my view towards the notion of a future ‘tense’ as coming from English. Of course, there is no reason to assume that what is so in one language is also the case in another, even when the languages are related, but I do notice that it isn't without reason both semantically and formally to consider the similarities between werden and the modal verbs in German. – James Wells Jun 02 '23 at 20:50