Nun habe ich kontrollieren lassen

[winged finch]

Nun habe ich kontrollieren lassen, wem das Handy gehört, und dabei bin ich auf Sie gekommen.
Having a bit of difficulty understanding the first sentence. What does it mean?

[late geyser]

https://www.deepl.com/en/translator#de/en/Nun habe ich kontrollieren lassen%2C wem das Handy gehört%2C und dabei bin ich auf Sie gekommen.

not my intention to shoo you away, but it's best to learn to help yourself with such questions 😅

or is it that you've already tried a translator and the part you marked still doesn't make sense?

[winged finch]

yeah exactly

[late geyser]

cause that part is simply not translatable to english with the same meaning, basically it says:

i've let others take a look into the issue who owns the mobile phone

... but "others" is just an auxiliary construct you have to use in English to come close to what the german sentence says

you might also say

"On the issue who owns the mobile, i've made others look into that, and ..."

or "i had others look into that"

[winged finch]

oh i understand....the only part that confused me was using past tense. i see lassen is in present tense. where do we get the meaning of "i have let" as past tense?

isnt it lassen ließ gelassen?

[late geyser]

i'm far from the best to explain grammar, @sharp forge will be better explaining this in depth, but what i know is that the "ge-" vanishes in such constructs, compare it to:

"Das Fahrrad ist gestohlen worden", while usually the perfekt of "werden" would be "geworden" but in such sentences the "ge-" vanishes ... but i've no clue why 😂

[winged finch]

probably would have been best if i had mentioned that in the post, sorry about that

[late geyser]

take everything i say with a BIG grain of salt, it could be wrong entirely :S

but i do know that you're right with "gelassen", but i'm also confident that the sentence above is correct

[winged finch]

i dont know if im right, but maybe i overlooked it very quickly...i took a quick look at dict.cc and it said lassen ließ gelassen...but now that i see it a bit more carefully, it says lassen ließ gelassen / (mit zweitem infinitiv) lass (z.B.: machen lassen)

[late geyser]

yea that

[winged finch]

so i think that solves the problem, as in yes indeed lassen is here in the past perfect been used

[deft perch]

They are called 'Modalverbähnliche' Verben, it includes lassen, kommen, gehen etc

you can find an article about it if you look it up

👍

[winged finch]

i'll check it out, thanks

[late geyser]

if you take a different construct, the "ge-" reeappears, like:

"Ich habe zugelassen" (zulassen), dass jemand anders kontrolliert, dass ..."

but yea, what Delli said basically