I must say that I am completely discouraged about the future of the English language. It is gradually and relentlessly being destroyed by people who should know better. The basic problem is that these people are totally unaware of how little they know about the structure of our language.
The problem to which I refer in the title is based on inadequate understanding of verbs in the English language. The past tense of a regular verb is formed by adding "ed" to the base. For example, the verb, "to walk" (this is the infinitive form):"walked" is the form used for the past tense.
However, many of our frequently used verbs are irregular in form. For example, "to take". The simple past tense is "took", and you say, "I took". But if you want to use the pluperfect past tense, you must use the past participle "taken" with an auxiliary verb: "I had taken".
I was disgusted this morning to read an article on the MSN Sympatico home page written by Jeffrey Baynes (MSN shopping editor)in which he said, "...and wonder why I had not took the plunge yet"!
That affects me like fingernails on a blackboard!
Refer to my previous post from March 2, 2009.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment