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enthusiast
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cheers bingley,
and nicely explained too.
william
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old hand
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>how many tenses are there in the english language? pretense is also frequently encountered 
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Carpal Tunnel
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>how many tenses are there in the english language?
pretense is also frequently encountered
Oh, this is getting intense!
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#4114
09/15/2000 11:05 AM
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I'm currently absorbed by "Conversations about the end of time" [with Stephen Jay Gould, Umberto Eco, Jean-Claude Carriere and Jean Delumeau. Fromm, NY, 2000]. In answer to the question "Are we witnessing the end of time?", Carriere [amongst other things, Bunuel's scriptwriter] responds:
"The first thing that occurs to me, and which is indisputable, is that we are seeing the end of a number of grammatical tenses. Where has the future anterior gone? What's happened to the past historic? The imperfect subjunctive is only very rarely used nowadays … What are grammatical tenses if not the painstaking attempt of our precise, meticulous minds to envisage all the possible shapes that time can take, all the ways in which we relate to time within the domain of our thoughts and actions? … We shall never be able to carve up time into a sufficient number of tenses to control it and be able to say, at each instant within its fleeting forward movement: That's the time it is."
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#4115
09/15/2000 12:01 PM
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Very true, paulb, very true! A great many people have
extreme difficulty accecpting the fact that there are things in their lives that they cannot control.
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#4116
09/15/2000 12:44 PM
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stranger
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I have a question; probably should be posted on a grammar board, but hope I will get an answer.
What truly makes an adjective? As example, the word "oust" is defined as a verb; however, the word can be used as an adjective (participle): "The ousted politician ..."
My question: Is a true adjective a word that cannot be used as a verb? A "red" apple; a "blue" sky. Are true adjectives words that cannot be used as verbs?
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"ousted" is merely an inflected form of the verb oust; that doesn't make it any less "real" -- maybe the word you want is "pure" to suggest an adjective which has no inflected forms.
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>"ousted" is merely an inflected form of the verb oust<
I recall things in Latin called gerunds and gerundives, which were verbal adjectives and verbal nouns. Unfortunately I can't remember which were which, but 'ousted' is a verbal adjective.
The examples which got me confused were the 'ing' words:
I am walking in the park. verb.
I like walking in the park. noun
The walking man is in the park. adjective.
...
And tsuwm, whilst I understand what you are getting at with 'pure' adjectives, I think we have discussed in many threads how poor little virgin adjectives (and other parts of speech!) become sullied and corrupted with the passage of time.
The valet blacked his master's shoes.
The novelist carefully whited out the mistakes in her manuscript.
...are these adjectival verbs????? ...Help!...
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#4119
09/18/2000 11:18 AM
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May I follow up my earlier post quoting Carriere in 'Conversations about the end of time'? A little later on he quotes an Indian friend, Moshe Agashi, about 'time':
"When you look at a watch dial for the time, that time is situated within the circle of time. You immediately recall what you have done in the course of the day, where you were this morning, what time it was when you bumped into your friend, you remember when dusk is going to fall, and you see the time that's left before bedtime, when you'll go to bed sure in the knowledge of another day well spent, and with the certainty also that on the following day time will resume its daily course around your watch. If all you've got is a little rectangle, you have to live life as a series of moments, and you lose all true measure of time."
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. If all you've got is a little rectangle, you have to live life as a series of moments
Was he referring to television?
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>...television?
more likely a digital chronometer
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old hand
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>time will resume its daily course around your watch..<
Very recently I discussed about the timeless subject of time with a physicist colleague, and he thought that this cyclic (or periodic) aspect was part of the very definition of time. But I objected that there are the various phenomena of monotonous decay (aging, radioactivity..) which also unambiguously mark the arrow of time.
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#4123
09/19/2000 10:58 AM
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With the introduction of digital watches, I sometimes wonder if 'clockwise' is about to become a 'lost word'.
My wristwatch (with dial) was a Christmas present from my wife in 1962 and still works perfectly -- no batteries, no winding, no obsolescence!
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#4124
09/19/2000 11:46 AM
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My wristwatch (with dial) was a Christmas present from my wife in 1962 and still works perfectly -- no batteries, no winding, no obsolescence!
Hope I'm not being too archaic; am by your leave, complimenting your wife.
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>I sometimes wonder if 'clockwise' is about to become a 'lost word'< Let's join forces to keep 'clockwise' in existence, but replace 'anticlockwise' with the much more wonderful (and possibly more venerable - WAY too lazy to go and look it up!) 'widdershins'! 
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'anticlockwise'!? I've never heard that! We say counterclockwise! And 'widdershins'?? Gosh, Bridget, that sounds like you live in Australia or something! 
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My friend Brewer tells that
… witches and warlocks were supposed to approach the Devil withershins [or widdershins, from OE wither=against]. The opposite of withershins is 'deasil' meaning righthandwise or sunwise [from Gaelic].
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Pooh-Bah
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Is a true adjective a word that cannot be used as a verb? A "red" apple; a "blue" sky. Are true adjectives words that cannot be used as verbs?In my younger days, the weekly wash was "blued;" i.e., blue powder was put into the water to make the laundry look whiter when it emerged. I think some modern washing powders use a similar technique. Also, when all of your money had been spent, particularly on riotous living, one was said to have "blued" it. Not sure of the etymology of that one, though. Perhaps a corruption of "blown", as in "blown away" And the verbal noun is the gerund, the verbal adjective the gerundive, I believe. ( I gleaned that from either Fowler or Partridge, almost certainly, says he, religiously acknowledging his sources
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>witches and warlocks were supposed to approach the Devil withershins [or widdershins, from OE wither=against]. <
It is also quite unacceptable to go round a Tibetan Buddhist temple or religious site withershins. (I'll take either spelling!)
paulb, thank you for introducing me to deasil! WIthout the explanation I would have thought this something not particularly attractive - strong association with weasel - but how wrong I would have been. What a great word.
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I got taken to a site at anna's suggestion in another string, which for anyone who didn't LIU, also contained the following joke more relevant to this topic: JOYS OF CONJUGATION A businessman arriving in Boston for a convention found that his first evening was free, and he decided to go find a good seafood restaurant that served Scrod, a Massachussetts specialty. Getting into a taxi, he asked the cab driver, "Do you know where I can get Scrod around here?" "Sure," said the cabdriver. "I know a few places... but I can tell you it's not often I hear someone use the third-person pluperfect indicative anymore!"
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>What truly makes an adjective? As example, the word "oust" is defined as a verb; however, the word can be used as an adjective (participle): "The ousted politician ..."
An adjective is a word that modifies a noun. But what you have here is a clause that has been shortened. When you read "the ousted politician" you see a Bush. NO. That's not right. Sorry. Wrong forum. When you read "the ousted politician" what you are actually seeing is a shorthand of "the politician who had been ousted". Subordinate clause, if I remember correcty.
TEd
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old hand
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Yielding to the temptation to try and untwist that long-suffering thread, let me modestly mention that "participle" stems from "participere", i.e. taking part in both the world of verbs and the world of adjectives. Furthermore, an adjective can be used in an attributive sense: "The red apple fell from the tree." or in a predicative sense: "The apple is red". Now if you say: "the politician was (is) ousted", it is arbitrary to consider "ousted" a form of a verb or an adjective in predicative use: it is a participle. The attributive use of participles is more restricted: You can say: "the bike was thrown into the canal", but as for "The thrown bike.." I am not so sure..
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Pooh-Bah
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>Yielding to the temptation to try and untwist that long-suffering thread ...
Wow! Wsieber - I've just been practising my school-girl Spanish and I come back to this piece written in your second (or is it your third?) language!
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as for "The thrown bike.." I am not so sure..
But it presumabaly can be used to differentiate - as in 'Two bicycles were found when the canal was drained, one of which had clearly been thrown into the water quite deliberately. The thrown bicycle was out in the middle of the waterway.' Or is this a different form?
And how about 'thrown pottery' as distinct from coiled, slab, and other methods?
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old hand
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>And how about 'thrown pottery' as distinct from coiled, slab, and other methods?< Thank you, maverick, for this pertinent example of a participle in attributive use, on the verge of turning into an adjective. Pottery is one of my hobbies .
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old hand
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>..in your second (or is it your third?) language< Thanks for this nice compliment  . Actually, I acquired English after French, but probably practised both about to the same extent. I would not mention this if it weren't for a hot controversy raging, at present, in Switzerland, about which language should be taught first, in primary school..
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Thank you, maverick, for this pertinent example of a participle in attributive use, on the verge of turning into an adjective. Pottery is one of my hobbies
My pleasure, wsieber - one good turn deserves another.
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#4138
09/28/2000 12:45 PM
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Other features which can be used to differentiate adjectives from participles:
most adjectives have comparative and superlative forms,
most adjectives can be modified by adverbs of degree like very or absolutely , e.g. very rich or absolutely fabulous .
There are degrees of adjectivalness: the most adjectival adjectives have all four features: predicative use, attributive use, comparative and superlative forms, modifiable by adverbs of degree. Other adjectives may only have three of the features. Once we get down to only two or one of these features, the arguments start.
Bingley
Bingley
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Bingley,
You know so very much! I am so impressed!
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