Discussion
I love how people from the UK say "had done" ... for example.
"He would not agree even if he had done."
I guess what I'm missing here is the "it"
"He would not agree if he had done it."
But more than just being a quirk it has a different kind of spiffy feel to it? "as if you would do" for "as if you'd ever do that"
I wonder if it's regional within the UK, or if it's just the US that's still using the extra words and just where English is going.
@futurebird it makes me think of of a typical Latin grammar; I have read in many places that the most common word order in Latin is subject, object, verb. Of course that may be because it's the first word order they teach in a typical Latin textbook; other word orders were used. English, on the other hand, more often ends with an object, at least when spoken by the plebs. It's as if there's a desire among the educated to remind listeners "I took Latin, if you would care to recall!"
@futurebird he would not agree, even if he had agreed?
believe you me, getting the subtleties of meaning in English is sometimes really hard as a second language learner.
It's driving me all but crazy*
(*still having a hard time fully grasping this idiom)
"If he'd tried it he'd know better and agree that it's good."
"No, he would not agree (it is good) even if he had done. (tried it)"
And now we're into AAVE with "had done tried it" which is very southern, the most familiar example of this informal construction being "you done messed up son"
@futurebird I even automatically read that with a southern twang
@futurebird @Tom_ofB or it's less-couth cousins... 😄
@futurebird is present here in Australia too
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@futurebird Learning Swedish perhaps gives me an insight I might not otherwise realise, as a native Old World English speaker (Ireland, UK, South Africa).
In Swedish we have the supine tense, which modifies the second verb in this construction your showing here:
Jag har gjört = I have done. Gjört is göra in the supine, and göra means to be. It seems correct also to say Jag här gjört det, too, though. The point being that in Swedish it's formally defined as a tense in this way, with its own verb modification system. So I guess the UK English construction feels a little more intelligible to me from seeing how it works in a closely related language!