[Ads-l] antedating (?) of conditional "would have" = 'had'

[Jonathan Lighter]

>Sigh<. Sometimes a hunch pays off.

An earlier printing of the passage:

1900 _Cleveland [O.] Gazette_(March 10) 2:

A colored soldier writing to the New York Age from Manila, Philippine
Islands, under the date of August. 11, 1899, says:

". . .  All this never would have occurred if the army of occupation had
treated them as people."


I don't have access to the _N.Y. Age_ column, but editor Gatewood
 (presumably a "would have" innovator himself) was quoting the passage from
the  _Wisconsin Weekly Advocate_ (May 17, 1900), p. 1.

Which likewise prints "if...had."

JL


On Thu, Dec 31, 2015 at 11:08 PM, Wilson Gray <hwgray at gmail.com> wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Wilson Gray <hwgray at GMAIL.COM>
> Subject:      Re: antedating (?) of conditional "would have" = 'had'
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> On Thu, Dec 31, 2015 at 7:44 AM, Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> > I've always thought of this as a rather recent
> > development.
> >
>
> Thangs be's that way. I've recently found out that one of my pettest
> peeves, splitting an infinitive with "not," e.g.:
>
> "to be or _to not be_"
>
> as Shakespeare didn't put it - which struck me as being about a
> quarter-century old, can be found in Wycliffe's Bible:
>
> "Thou that prechist _to not stele_ stelist?"
>
> Youneverknow.
>
>
> --
> -Wilson
> -----
> All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint to
> come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
> -Mark Twain
>
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