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into me. "Ach", she exclaimed, "l'm so sorry, I
haven't seen you!" An English person would, of
course, have said, "1 didn't see you!"
One of the more bizarre bits of tense behaviour is
where the simple past is used to refer to the future,
albeit a hypothetical one:
'It's time you bought an umbrella.'
'If you caught the evening train, you could
be here by tomorrow.'
For Germans the second sentence, an example of a
type 2 conditional, is especially bewildering, the
most fluent often replacing the 'If you caught...' with
an 'lf you would catch...'.
Singular or plural?
Students of English grammar often complain that the
simplest mies are peppered with exceptions. What
could be more straightforward than the notion of the
subject of a sentence agreeing with the verb in
number, i. e. a
Singular
subject gets a
Singular
verb, a
plural subject a plural verb? In German it is always
'Die Regiemng trifft neue Maßnahmen' and never
'Die Regiemng treffen...' Yet in English it is jjerfectly
in
O r d e r
to say 'The government is/are introducing
new
measures.' Here there is no mechanical mle of
concordance, no simple surface grammar. The
English native-sf)eaker dives boldly below the
surface to interrogate the meaning of his subject. Is
'the government' to be thought of as a collective
entity, and therefore
Singular,
or is it rather an
assortment of cabinet ministers and members of
parliament, in which case it is plural? Sports
commentators almost always use plural verbs for
football teams, e. g. 'Chelsea are through to the final'.
They are clearly thinking of 11 individuals in blue
and white
Strip,
and not some harmonious body that
moves as one. Where Chelsea - and most other
soccer teams - are concemed, the commentators
are,
of course, quite right.
No real altemative
If we lived in a world govemed by Reason (ah!), the
question of a world language would
be
debated at
the United Nations. You can imagine that the
People's Republic of China would argue in favour of
Mandarin Chinese, since already more people in the
world speak that language than any other. The Spa-
nish delegate, with fervent support from the Latin
Americans, would counter that Spanish is not only
one of the more common languages of the world but
is also easier to lern than English. The Koreans
would speak up for their minimal aiphabet of 24
letters. The Greeks would counter that their aiphabet
had 24 letters. The Japanese would claim that
nothing could be easier than a language with no
grammatical gender. But English will continue to
proliferale throughout the world as the universal
second language.
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Your grandson might object quite lilerally
that
he
hadn't had it.
Idioms also include those conventional ways of
saying things such as 'able to do' and 'capable of
doing'. There is no grammatical reason why 'able'
should be followed by the Infinitive and 'capable' by
of + gerund. They are just idioms and have to be
learnt. All those phrasal verbs that native-speakers
often prefer to their latinate equivalents are idiomatic
too. E. g. George came up with a brilliant idea for
cutting costs. In other words he produced a good
idea. It is idiom that renders a language complex,
rieh and interesting, but for the practical purposes of
an international medium it only frustrates
communication. Nothing could be more idiomatic
than the English used by William Shakespeare to
entertain Elizabethan audiences - and nothing
would be more inappropriate for an intemational
business
C o n f e r e n c e .
Like all languages, English is based on mies, but
compared to German grammar, English grammar is
fraught with ambiguities and paradoxes, and the
more inconsistences you have in a language, the
more difficult it is to learn. A strictly logical (because
artificial) language like Esperanto has only sixteen
mies. It has a present tense which refers exclusively
to the present. English, as you may know, has a
simple present tense which refers to the present, the
past and the future!
E. g. George hears a stränge noise outside ...
George hears his exam results tomorrow.
1 hear that George passed his exam. (' 1 hear'
refers to a moment in the past when 1 actually
heard this news.)
But English has a second present tense (who really
needs two?), described in grammar books variously
as the present continuous or the present progressive.
This is reserved largely for actions that are in the
process of happening, e. g.:
Look! The shareholders are waving their fists.
or
Why are you smoking? Can't you see the no
Smoking
sign?
Once you have grasped the idea that the present
continuous is used to describe present actions, it
comes as a shock to discover that it is also used to
describe future arrangements!
E.
g.
We are returning to Munich tomorrow.
Whilst still on the subject of tenses, I feel I ought to
share some collective guilt for the Present Perfect.
This is used, for instance, to describe the completion
of some activity. 'Look, I've cut the grass. (Now can 1
have a beer?)' So when you read: 'Henry has been in
prison for five years' you might think that he'd
completed his sentence, but not so: he's still inside.
German and French
Speakers
insist, much to the EFL
teacher's chagrin, that 'Henry is in prison since five
years'. Where Germans lend to use the Present
Perfect for any completed event, at least in speech,
the British make a careful distinction between what
is past and what is past with some bearing on the
present. My first awareness of the different German
usage occurred years ago in North Oxford, home to
many refugees from Hitler. At the corner of a street a
little old lady, her eyes on the pavement, ran straight
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