What's the difference between "hilf mir, bitte" and "helft mir, bitte"?
I can't even remember where I saw these, to be honest. I just wrote them down in the hope that I would eventually get off my blessed assurance and find the answer. It's a praxis thing, you see. I never really understand something until I challenge myself to question it deeper, and then think about how I could explain it to someone else.
I'm not 100% sure of this, because I'm piecing this together from two separate conjugation tables which are each giving me half the story. I may be wrong, but I'll discover that later.
In "hilf mir, bitte", helfen is clearly in the 2nd person informal singular (2PISg) imperative form.
I think, although I'm not sure, that in "helft mir, bitte", it's in the the 2nd person informal plural (2PIPl) imperative form.
Now, I'm not sure about this, because one of my conjugation tables lists "helft" as the standard present tense form for 2PIPl, and as far as I know you usually drop the present tense endings for an imperative.
But at the same time, I'm pretty sure I've never encountered imperatives for 2PIPl before, so I have no idea if they should have the ending or not.
In my other conjugation table, it *does* include "helft" on the list of imperatives (along with "hilf" and "helfen"), but doesn't put a pronoun next to it (like it does for almost everything else), so I can only assume it's for 2PIPl.
So, I think the difference between "hilf mir, bitte" and "helft mir, bitte" is the number of people you are asking for help at the time.
No comments:
Post a Comment