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

Wilson Gray hwgray at GMAIL.COM
Sat Jan 2 07:02:16 UTC 2016


On Fri, Jan 1, 2016 at 10:37 AM, Jonathan Lighter <wuxxmupp2000 at gmail.com>
wrote:

> A colored soldier writing


The Public - Volume 2; Volume 11 - Page 444
https://books.google.com/books?id=azLmAAAAMAAJ
The Public
Second Year.
Chicago, Saturday, October 14, 1899. Number 80. Page 13
Louis Freeland Post, ‎Alice Thatcher Post, ‎Stoughton Cooley - 1899 -
‎American periodicals
FROM A COLORED SOLDIER IN MANILA. Extracts from a letter dated Manila, P.
I., August 11, published in the New York Age of October 5[, 1899].
"... of occupation _had_ treated them as people."

This letter also contains the following:

"[A]sk them _to not forget_ the present administration at the next
election."

I prefer _would have treated _ and _not to forget_.

That's the breaks. :-(
-- 
-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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