Today I am going to make some sentences from the verbs we did yesterday. I will leave it to you to translate the sentences. I will pick one verb and make a series of sentences using the time elements as the only change in the sentences.
The sentence we will start with is:
ni maqlaqs hemkanga.
What does it mean? ________________________________________________________.
What are the parts: ni = I; maqlaqs =can be singular or plural, but people will work
hemkanga=speak, say are the most common meanings.
So we have: I, the people, speak.
So, now we will add a time element: ona=yesterday.
ona ni maqlaqs hemkanga. ______________________________________________________.
This time element defines the tense we can use in translating. Because it happened yesterday, we must use the past one of the past tenses.
The possibilities are:
Yesterday I spoke to the people.
Yesterday I was speaking to the people.
Yesterday I had spoken to the people.
Usually the context of the conversation will help you decide which is the best translation. We have no context here so we must pick one. They are all correct.