Hey guys,
This is my first post on here, and forgive me for it being perhaps a strange, even pedantic, question, but I've been wondering about reported speech in Russian, and none of the material I've found online has really answered this. I understand that tenses don't change in Russian in reported speech. But, basically, I'm an English teacher, and these are some examples I use to explain why the tenses sometimes have to change simply to make sense:
"He said he'd do something, so he did."
Now, his original statement would've been, for example:
"I'll buy a ticket." // "Я куплю билет."
But reported in Russian that would be:
Он сказал, что он купит билет, поэтому он купил.
Simply from a logical standpoint "он купит билет, поэтому он купил" sounds... just bizarre: "He will buy, so he bought."
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I understand "future in the past" works in a similar way:
When he was a child, John Lennon didn't know he'd be a famous singer.//
Когда он был ребенком, Джон Леннон не знал, что он будет знаменитым певцом.
"John Lennon will be" sounds ludicrous because he's been dead for 37 years, how can we use a future tense to talk about him except in some sort of "John Lennon will be the subject of tomorrow's lecture" sense?
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Granted, these are very specific examples, as I said I use such sentences when I'm teaching to highlight why we have to, logically, change the tenses in reported speech and FITP. Is this just, for lack of a better word, a hole in the Russian language because they don't have English's number of tenses to accommodate it? Or is there some rare grammar taught at a level I haven't reached yet for such cases where logic dictates?
