Also has incredibly good math institutions

“French research is underfunded since decades” is a French-ism, just so you know. Normally native English speakers would say “French research has been underfunded for decades”.

Depuis ?

That can be used with either a duration (“depuis des décennies”) or a point in time (“depuis 1995”). English “since” can only be used with a point in time.

Merci!

I think “merci, mon ami français” would be more correct, but at any rate, I’m not French!

I've noticed a lot of comments on Hacker News that use this construction. I don't point it out because often people dislike unsolicited advice about their English.

Spanish speakers also make this mistake. I haven't met German speakers, but they also say the equivalent of "is (adjective) since (time)" in German. It makes me wonder if English is just unusually strict about this distinction compared to other European languages.

I am also not a huge fan of unsolicited grammatical advice, because I feel like it's both low effort and derails the conversation. If the grammar error is more syntactical in nature and doesn't obscure the meaning of the thoughts intended to be conveyed, then let's just all move on.

This is an international forum, we're well accustomed to being able to parse meaning despite a few inconsequential grammatical issues.

People can just not engage in conversations they don’t like. This forum has a branching structure, it is easy to hide a topic that you don’t like.

If someone was to be really odious and hateful, the presence of that sort of thing could be harmful, but this seems like a polite correction of a common problem. And it is an international forum, there are plenty of people who might get something from language-chat.

I pointed it out because when I lived in France, I personally appreciated people pointing out grammatical mistakes I made in French. If the OP doesn’t care about sounding more like a native English speaker, that’s perfectly fine and he can just ignore my comment.

As someone learning a language that's not my native one, people who correct my Chinese kindly are the absolute gold standard. People who correct it rudely are rare but still more helpful than people who say nothing and just move on. This is very common in language learning communities. My default assumption is that other people who are learning a language that I know natively probably feel similar, and would appreciate kind, contextual corrections. I am happy to adjust if someone lets me know they don't want that or if it's against the rules of a specific forum.

I think most European languages lack the distinction between “he did X” and “he has done X”. Actually, a lot of languages (including Spanish, German and French) have a distinction like this syntactically but it doesn’t really mean the same thing as it does in English.

Huh, I just had a fairly long and fruitless conversation with ChatGPT 4 trying to understand whether this was true. ChatGPT kept insisting that romance languages distinguish between the preterite ("he did," simple past tense) and the present perfect ("he has done"), but every time I asked it to give me specific examples it would start translating them, find that they were the same, and then say "well, in Italian [or French] it's actually more about context..."

Finally it was able to give me the Spanish "Él hizo esto" vs "Él ha hecho esto," but admitted that whether one used one vs the other was quite regional.

In French, they only use the equivalent of the simple past tense in books, but in speech they usually only ever say the equivalent of "has done" in speech no matter the context. I don't speak French (not as a second language nor as my native language), but this is something I've read about secondhand in textbooks and online.

In Spanish, they do make a distinction in neutral speech, but it's not uncommon for someone to only ever use one or the other depending on the region they're from. The auxiliary verb form ("haber hecho" / "to have done") is more common in Spain than Latin America. Though, I don't know how much we should go into this; I feel like we've kind of derailed from the original topic.

I wonder if it is just the result of applying some transformation to “was underfunded for decades” in an attempt to make it cover the present.

A Gallicism :)

Thanks, I knew there was a word I was forgetting…