@leroc Oh, of course – as my wife is German but essentially fully bilingual, it’s only the most subtle of things that she gets “wrong”, like this one, but more broadly, English is a disaster to learn as a second language, at least if the hope is to become “perfect”.
But equally, the immense flexibility of the language means that it’s still possible to be understood even if you’re mangling it horribly, as indeed most native English speakers do too 🤪
@leroc Which reminds me of a story that I once heard Reimar Lüst, a former ESA DG, tell.
He said he visited a physics institute in the Soviet Union in the 1960s, which was filled with visiting scientists from various communist bloc countries.
Surprised by the language he heard being used, he asked his host “Why is everyone speaking in broken English?”
To which the answer was “Because Russian does not break very easily.” 🙂
@leroc Good spot – indeed, English is a real mishmash of a language & while Benjamin Franklin & other Americans tried to iron out some of the Romance language oddities, they really only succeeded in screwing things up even further 🤪
On the one hand, English grammar is relatively simple (no gendered nouns, no cases, very few verb forms). On the other hand, it is messy (a consequence of different grammars meshed together). As I said, any foreign learner can attest to this.
But the upside is, as you said, that it is easy to learn. Broken English works well. (You hear it a lot among EU diplomats in Brussels.)
@leroc Ha – having worked for the European Space Agency for fifteen years, I can but confirm that too 🙂
Interestingly & pragmatically, there’s an acceptance in the Agency that documents written in English don’t have to be absolutely perfect grammatically, albeit sometimes it can matter.
One of those is when PR’s are written: to me, it was always essential that they be edited by a native English speaker or a full bilingual. Not everyone agreed, however 🤷♂️
I mean, yes, “we are having fish for dinner” can also be used to describe the future, but “we have fish for dinner” really doesn’t work well to describe the present process of actually eating the fish.
Perhaps there’s a logical grammatical explanation for this apparently inconsistent usage, but buggered if I could do more than vaguely wave my hands around when my German wife queried me on it 🤷♂️😬
“It just sounds right” isn’t exactly an answer, now is it?
It is a truism, perhaps overstated but nevertheless not without basis, that the first time most English people encounter grammar is when they learn a foreign language. Or in many cases, if.
@markmccaughrean I actually wouldn't see the second one as being wrong, just unusual in having the continuous present, then switching to simple present.
@markmccaughrean The latter bit about word order is very hard to explain and definitely something "you just know". English isn't unique that way. Lots of languages have things more felt than easy to explain.
I think with the present there - it puts a slightly different emphasis. And it works in this case because you can "have fish" as a simple thing...it doesn't suffer from lack of emphasis on it being a continuing present thing. You can also say "we have friends over" and match the two tenses
@meganL I agree that “we have friends over” describes the simple present well, as in my first example, but “we have fish for dinner” really does a poor job of conveying the fact that you’re currently eating it.
Whereas “we are having fish for dinner” works well for both that and a description of the state of having fish which may be consumed later.
But “we are having friends over” doesn’t work well as a description of the present: it sounds exclusively future oriented to my ears.
@meganL Of course, there are many versions of English spoken as a first language, & if I think of “we are having friends over” being spoken by an Indian, it could quite plausibly become a description of the present 🙂
And language evolves constantly: the phrase “I am loving it” using the continuous present feels very contemporary & sounds frankly horrific to my old head, for which the simple present “I love it” suffices perfectly.
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