Re:A Farewell to LWN
by dragonwriter on Thursday December 23, 2021 @03:36PM
(#29666161)
> English has more complicated verbs and tenses than many other languages
I’ve only learned a few other languages, but none of them have simpler sets of tenses than English (most of them have more differences in conjugation/inflection to reflect them, but also more regularity; English also has a fair number of idioms in which the semantics as far as time don't necessarily match what is normal for the syntax of the tense, but I’m not sure its unusually dense with those.)
EDIT: But:
> “I forget” means something like “I have forgotten at some point and continue to not remember” whereas “I forgot” means “I did forget” without reporting anything on your current state of remembering
If you think of “to forget” as equivalent of “to fail to remember something which one once knew” (which I think is the best understanding of that verb), that’s pretty much just what you’d expect from the present and past tenses, respectively.
I’ve only learned a few other languages, but none of them have simpler sets of tenses than English (most of them have more differences in conjugation/inflection to reflect them, but also more regularity; English also has a fair number of idioms in which the semantics as far as time don't necessarily match what is normal for the syntax of the tense, but I’m not sure its unusually dense with those.)
EDIT: But:
> “I forget” means something like “I have forgotten at some point and continue to not remember” whereas “I forgot” means “I did forget” without reporting anything on your current state of remembering
If you think of “to forget” as equivalent of “to fail to remember something which one once knew” (which I think is the best understanding of that verb), that’s pretty much just what you’d expect from the present and past tenses, respectively.