Timeline for "Important that John bring/brings"
Current License: CC BY-SA 3.0
6 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Jul 26, 2011 at 20:15 | comment | added | Neil Coffey | @doncherry -- I'm not sure that we can say with 100% certainty everything you state, but I've +1'd anyway for the general essence of what you're saying. The notion of "the language works this way, but really it 'should' work this way" is not uncommon, but really quite bizarre when you actually think about it. Unless you really think that the people who invent opinions about how they think the language 'should' work have some kind of direct line with God that is unavailable to the rest of humanity, then there's little intrinsic basis for the notion of "correct even though people don't use it". | |
| Jul 25, 2011 at 19:19 | comment | added | doncherry | -1 if I could for "Although people commonly use the indicative instead of the subjunctive, that doesn't make it right." This is exactly how language change happens, and this is not a bad thing! I can assure you, in a hundred years, nobody will use the subjunctive, most certainly not in spoken language. As of today, there are some people who make a distinction between subjunctive and indicative, and it's nice to be able to decode this distinction, but other people simply don't use it, and there's nobody on this planet who can say that that is bad. | |
| Jul 23, 2011 at 2:10 | comment | added | mgiuca | Best answer, for pointing out the fact that there are actually two subtly different things to be said, and that the two forms are both correct and have different meanings. | |
| Jul 23, 2011 at 2:08 | vote | accept | mgiuca | ||
| Jul 22, 2011 at 22:49 | comment | added | FumbleFingers | +1 for pointing out the "correct" meaning of OP's first sentence, which I didn't even recognise at the time. You must admit the chances that OP intends that meaning here are about zero, but that's no reason the rest of us should be denied the chance to use it. I'll flag up your point in my answer. | |
| Jul 22, 2011 at 22:13 | history | answered | Jez | CC BY-SA 3.0 |