Tenses, Past and Present

[steepholm]

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Comments

[heleninwales]

How interesting that Japan only has two tenses! Tenses are slippery things and don't always match from language to language, as I've discovered while learning Welsh.

The pluperfect hasn't died out as far as I'm concerned, but I must try to take note of the way people use the past tense in the forums I moderate online. There are quite a lot of English as second language users of Habitica, so I'll see if I can spot any trends. It's certainly introduced the phrase "very fun" which I see a lot and it's very difficult to explain why it's not right.

[steepholm]

I hadn't though about "very fun" before. It's as if the grammar wants to treat it as a quantity (that you can have more or less of) rather than a quality (that you can have larger or smaller degrees of).

[sartorias]

Grammar has been so badly taught overall, since the seventies crash in American education, that many very bright and articulate adults now in their forties (and of course younger) don't even realize how ignorant they are of grammar.And now they are teachers. So yes, there's a rapid evolution going on, dumbing down the language here.

[steepholm]

I don't know about grammar teaching in the US, but it can hardly be worse that it was for a long time in the UK! As I say below to ashkitty, though, I don't think this kind of change can plausibly be blamed on grammar lessons - it's more likely a shift in the language itself, regrettable or otherwise.

[ashkitty]

I used to think American schools taught grammar badly and then I moved to Britain. Holy Christ. I had language classes with people (almost entirely from England) who had never been taught what a noun was. I understand this may have recently been improving, but the demise of grammatical nuance in the UK is entirely their own fault!

[steepholm]

I agree that the teaching of grammar in the UK was virtually non-existent for a good while. I got all my school age knowledge from learning German, plus my grandfather's various linguistic books that were lying around the house. (Since those were mostly from around 1900 my linguistic vocabulary is still probably a bit out of date). Still, I don't think that's the reason for the decline of the pluperfect! People don't general learn to use (as opposed to analyse) their native tongue by studying grammar. I think it may be a gradual shift of the kind that happens naturally in language all the time. Which isn't of course to say that we have to be happy about it - but where the subjunctive goes, the pluperfect seems likely to follow.