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Kinda off topic from someone whos mother tongue is not English: what happened in the past years that people apparently forgot how the irrealis works in English?
by marton78 5y ago
Kinda off topic from someone whos mother tongue is not English: what happened in the past years that people apparently forgot how the irrealis works in English? Shouldn't this be "Things I wish I had known when I learned TS" as opposed to "Things I wish I knew RIGHT NOW"?
- nosefrog 5y agoAs a native English speaker, I never learned formally about irrealis, so it's not possible for me to have forgotten them :P "Things I wish I had known" and "Things I wish I knew" both sound right to me.
- pavlov 5y agoYou’re not wrong, but language evolves. What’s convenient in the mouth of native speakers today will usually become grammatically correct eventually. It would be neat to title blog posts in mock Elizabethan English though: “Miscellania of Out-Most Significance to the Young Man Who Desireth to Learn the Merveillous Type-Scripte”
- throwaway675309 5y agoEven as a former ESL instructor, I'm rather disdainful of statements such as these, as if language is some "well defined codified construct" as opposed to being a fluid means of communication that continually evolves to meet cultural needs. It's like the word peruse, it traditionally meant "to look over something in great detail", yet you'll find the majority of people use it to mean "to look over some thing in a cursory fashion." So for all intents and purposes, that is the new de facto definition of the word.