Lo kallo baat !
As I write this post , I am reminded of Namak Hallal - "Lo kallo baat ! Arre babuji aisi English aave that I can leave Angrej behind!! You see sir, I can talk English, I can walk English, I can laugh English because English is a very funny language. ..."
Well I had to face the music myself. English sure is a funny language. When "I can do something" or "something can be done by me" while "something could have had been done by me" and definitely "if I will have said to have had done something" then it does get confusing.
I was hit bad by the tense bug. In a mail I wrote , there was a statement "GroupA have not tested the same with FEATURE-X enabled since there seems to have had been an understanding that the feature enablement would only be for ProductA and not ProductB" . The bold-ed text created all the confusion and made my head go spin.
Mandar refused to believe I was correct and Piyush eventually agreed I was right. I had to give them this explanation (my explanatory-knowledge for verbs and pronouns nouns etc, has taken a downward fall, hence could not explain the same in those contexts but rather in a more manageable and layman-ish way) This is what I said:
"The only other possibility was "since they seem to have had and understanding...." now since I used past participle with reference to an event .. the "since they..." changes to "since there..." and so " seem" would change to "seems" so "since there seems to have.." .. now the tense I use is past participle in perfect tense .. hence the "had" comes into play and so "since there seems to have had" now if I say "since there seems to have had an understanding" then this statement refers to a void which would mean that the understanding was done by "there" where there refers to nothing (basically a bad grammatic construct).. so we have to use "been" and then it creates the bridge between the referrer and the referee so the statement becomes "...since there seems to have had been an understanding...". Maybe I am completely wrong .. but this is what I believe in and would not budge from it." (I agree my knowledge of pas perfect and participle is jolly bad here- but does not mean my sentence is bad )
I know its too lame and loose to prove my statement. Mandar stood his ground saying "Your sentence is a very good example of Pig's English. I was taught Queen's English at school."
And so I started to read of past , present, past perfect, present perfect, past/present perfect continuous tenses. Oh man! am I out of touch with the basics of grammar! Sure I can speak right but ask me to explain in terms of tenses and verbs and adjectives etc etc. you will enjoy watching me go blank and dumb :)
So yes as for my sentence which created the confusion , I am jolly happy its correct but feel irritated not to give it a convincing explanation!
Well I had to face the music myself. English sure is a funny language. When "I can do something" or "something can be done by me" while "something could have had been done by me" and definitely "if I will have said to have had done something" then it does get confusing.
I was hit bad by the tense bug. In a mail I wrote , there was a statement "GroupA have not tested the same with FEATURE-X enabled since there seems to have had been an understanding that the feature enablement would only be for ProductA and not ProductB" . The bold-ed text created all the confusion and made my head go spin.
Mandar refused to believe I was correct and Piyush eventually agreed I was right. I had to give them this explanation (my explanatory-knowledge for verbs and pronouns nouns etc, has taken a downward fall, hence could not explain the same in those contexts but rather in a more manageable and layman-ish way) This is what I said:
"The only other possibility was "since they seem to have had and understanding...." now since I used past participle with reference to an event .. the "since they..." changes to "since there..." and so " seem" would change to "seems" so "since there seems to have.." .. now the tense I use is past participle in perfect tense .. hence the "had" comes into play and so "since there seems to have had" now if I say "since there seems to have had an understanding" then this statement refers to a void which would mean that the understanding was done by "there" where there refers to nothing (basically a bad grammatic construct).. so we have to use "been" and then it creates the bridge between the referrer and the referee so the statement becomes "...since there seems to have had been an understanding...". Maybe I am completely wrong .. but this is what I believe in and would not budge from it." (I agree my knowledge of pas perfect and participle is jolly bad here- but does not mean my sentence is bad )
I know its too lame and loose to prove my statement. Mandar stood his ground saying "Your sentence is a very good example of Pig's English. I was taught Queen's English at school."
And so I started to read of past , present, past perfect, present perfect, past/present perfect continuous tenses. Oh man! am I out of touch with the basics of grammar! Sure I can speak right but ask me to explain in terms of tenses and verbs and adjectives etc etc. you will enjoy watching me go blank and dumb :)
So yes as for my sentence which created the confusion , I am jolly happy its correct but feel irritated not to give it a convincing explanation!
Labels: Ramblings
posted by vindy | 3:16 PM
2 Comments:
Confusing post, man, but I can understand your predicament. While I'm good in spoken & written English, I can't really identify the correct grammatical context i.e. past participle, prepositions etc. I realized this while watching 'Are you smarter than a fifth grader?' where I had trouble answering 1st grade English grammar. So did you dust out your copy of 'Wren & Martin'? I wish I had that with me.
The explanation thing I simply wrote in a hurry ... and in the process simply strangled about the grammatic context :).. Well but all I intended was to get the message across..
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