since we just had a thread on the origins of "used to", how about "have to" and "have got to"? it seems like poor grammar to say "i have to be home by 4pm today" or "i've got to be home by 4pm today", but "I must be home etc." sounds stilted.

You could say "If I'm not home by 4 PM, I'm gonna get what Paddy gave the drum." That's not stilted, but you'd have to be tilted for punishment to be carried out. How can one discuss an idiom without sounding idiotic?

Of course, there is a problem about who is administering correction to whom. There is an old story about the guy who every time his wife misbehaved, he set out to spank her. But every time he got her skirt up, he forgot what he was mad about.

Tengo que preguntarla si habla Espanol.

Necesito preguntarle algo tambien...

Como se dice touche?

What is ungrammatical about "I have to be home by 4" or "I've got to be home by 4"? Both sound perfectly OK by me, and different from "I must be home by 4."

To vary the example a little, I think if you say "I must go now" it's some sort of self-imposed obligation to go, whereas if you say "I have to go now" there is some sort of external restraint insisting you go. "I've got to go" sounds more emphatic or desperate (I imagine a four year old with crossed legs).


Bingley

>Both sound perfectly OK by me

Agreed Bingley. 'Have' has many uses - the ones I know follow:

It can act as a main verb:

1) She has a beautiful house.

or as a modal:

2) We have got to go back some time.

or a catenate (joining) verb:

3) One has to go to Paris to find decent clothes (grin)
or "I have to be home by four."

I don't really get all that 'auxiliary verb' crap you read about. I mean, a modal verb is an auxiliary verb - a modal auxiliary, right? The prescriptivist and descriptivist grammarians have a field day debating modal verbs, but I horribly under qualified for that. I'll stop there.

Aside: anyone know where 'to have a field day' comes from. A relic from the Great War?

Tengo que preguntarla si habla Espanol.


Lo mismo yo iba mencionar.

What is ungrammatical about "I have to be home by 4" or "I've got to be home by 4"?

i misstated myself. i didn't mean to suggest that it is poor grammar, when this quite obviously *is acceptable usage. what i intended to say was that it seems strange usage of the word "have"; to my [limited] knowledge, none of the romance languages would use the verb root "avoir/tener/etc" to imply an imperative, but rather solely to indicate possession.

my query was simply how "have" came into this particular usage, not whether or not it's now grammatically correct. (sorry!)

none of the romance languages would use the verb root "avoir/tener/etc" to imply an imperative

Inselpeter y yo tenemos qué desavenirnos. The use of habere/tenere and their modern descendants as markers of necessity are quite common in Vulgar Latin and the Romance languages as see our posts above (or below for Threadnodists). Without digging too deeply, English is the only non-Romance language that I can think of wherein this is the case.

...doesn't fall within the realm of my kitchen spanish knowledge.

translation, please?

and thanks for clearing that up; my meager french education obviously failed me as well. (see why *my kids attend private schools? so they won't have to embarrass themselves on AWAD someday=)

tenemos qué desavenirnos

literally "We have to fall out"

figuratively "We must disagree"

And, technically, que shouldn't have an accent, as that's the interrogative form.

que shouldn't have an accent


Méa culpa. Never could remember when a word with a non-primary purpose accent actually® used it.

Qué que

Sí si

Sólo solo

Étc etc

Gótchá, Faldaje.

I like étc., will have to adopt that

also, gotcha is meant in the sense of "got it," not "got you"

no more edits or clarifications

But few idioms are Orphic.

[disclaimer] What I am going to say here applies to the verb desavenir(se) as it is used in Spain. It may well be that it is used differently in Latin America, and in that case those of you who know/have learnt Latin American Spanish probably know more than I do about it. [/disclaimer]

The verb desavenir(se) is both pronominal (i.e. has to have personal pronouns attached to it to complete its meaning), and reciprocal (the action is done and received by the different agents simultaneously). So, if Faldage says "Inselpeter y yo tenemos que desavenirnos", he's saying that he and Inselpeter have to disagree (or fall out) with each other, not with a third party. Let's hope this doesn't happen.

If Inselpeter and Faldage as a pair want to disagree with someone else, some good verbs are discrepar and disentir. Bringing the post back to topic, in Spanish we can use use both forms tener que and haber de (derived from Latin tenere and habere), to express "have to". So, Faldage has several stylistic options to pick from:

"Inselpeter y yo tenemos que discrepar" OR "Inselpeter y yo hemos de discrepar"
"Inselpeter y yo tenemos que disentir" OR "Inselpeter y yo hemos de disentir"

Sorry for the ramble.

¡Gracias para enseñarme!

¡De nada, Faldage! With all this super word knowledge going on around here, this is the little bit that I can contribute... so glad to help, if ever you have a query about Spanish.

And no usted for me... tú is just fine...