What are you going to do?:-(

Wilson Gray hwgray at GMAIL.COM
Fri Jun 24 00:07:21 UTC 2011


On Thu, Jun 23, 2011 at 5:27 PM, Jonathan Lighter
<wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Yeah, "has been" and "had been" feel to me like they're falling by the
> wayside. I've had experiences similar to yours.
>

You understand! May your tribe increase!

Damn it! Isn't it supposed to be the case that language changes in the
direction of ease of understanding?! Or is it, rather, that the shift
is in the direction of simplicity, understanding be damned? Perhaps
the final result will be greater skill at the analysis of tense by
sententio-environmental implication or whatever the proper jargon may
be.

OTOH, I have no particular problem with [tEkst] = both _text_ and the
reanalysis of _text_ as < /[[teks]+ed]/ like /[boks]+ed]/ or some
such. "He texted"?  "He texed"? Meh. WTF?

--
-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

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org



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