Grammar; verbs

[mtbc]

I like to think that my English grammar is quite good. I could write more readably but I also suspect that I actually write technically wrongly at times, in that I occasionally discover that I have been making a mistake and those discoveries will probably continue to occur. For example, in a recent journal entry I wrote, we have people using the wifi to make video calls from their laptop: should that plural for people have been somehow contagious, rendering their laptops also plural? Possibly so.

Still, despite my public^*-school education, I broadly wasn't taught English grammar formally at all; mostly I rely on my second-edition Fowler, though more recently Mignon Fogarty certainly earns an honorable mention. Much of what I do understand intellectually about English grammar I inferred from GCSE French, sometimes wrongly. I have an old book on linguistics on my bookshelves but I have yet to read it. I do have hope of finding it interesting when, in the nursing home or wherever, I finally get around to it.

I do impose my own perhaps-idiosyncratic thoughts on punctuation sometimes but in this entry I am content to focus on the words. In English lessons they didn't even tell us what to do with colons or semi-colons, except to avoid them for the moment. I even learned some of my handwriting in later life from one of my own employees, an Ivy League graduate.

So, the words: I was also never much good at Latin so can only imagine ancient Greek. I can't help but be curious about verb tenses, conflated perhaps with aspects, moods, whatever. While I don't wholly accept the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis anyway, I am nonetheless curious about what verb tenses might seem naturally expressible to speakers of classical languages that aren't found in modern English. What am I missing out on? Indeed, what are the different tenses and whatnot that I use in my English? Wikipedia seems to describe them in a pleasingly systematic way but if I were to study that article would my mind then be opened further if I learned Lojban's tense system?

I really don't know, but I do wonder, and of course I also wonder if anybody reading this might have any examples or other comments that might bear upon these musings.

^*In the British sense, i.e., rather private and selective; I have the Thatcher administration to thank for that.

Comments

[emperor]

I did both Latin and Ancient Greek to GCSE, which did involve a certain amount of grammar as you might expect. I'm not sure it made much impact upon my use of English, though!

[mtbc]

Oh, that's convenient. So you didn't run into things where you wondered how on Earth you'd express that in English? Interesting. I found out too late that very few people opted for Greek; small class sizes might have attracted me sufficiently.

Though just yesterday Dawn said that I have X for a single event she did in the past in a case where I would have said I had X and that got me wondering about the difference. had maybe feels a bit pregnant for a but.

And then I wonder about French where, say, in English I might say do sit down and I wonder how to translate the do.

(I'm not expecting answers, I'm just wondering aloud!)

[emperor]

I remember the ablative absolute being a bit weird "with the sacrifice having been offered...", but no, not especially.

[mtbc]

Thank you, that's encouraging.