Re: Have Had, Had Have

Trebor Jung wrote:

>Nik wrote: "To me, that just sounds bizarre, and I don't *think* I've ever
>heard it before, though I may have heard it and just thought it was an
>error."
>
>I agree. 'If he'd have gone' sounds fine, but 'If he've had gone' sounds
>very weird...
>
>
The former is 'He would have gone', the latter is ungrammatical anyway,
as 'have' doesn't agree with 'he'.  But 'If he's had gone' sounds
equally bizarre to me.

Now, the construction 'I'd've had to have eaten' is perfectly
grammatical to me.  It's the  perfect of 'I would have to eat'.  (In
French, 'j'aurais dû manger', German, 'ich hätte essen gemusst').  The
modals in English(to be able to/can, to have to/must, to want to, to be
going to/will/shall, to be obliged to/should, etc.), , rather cleverly,
though, allow either an inflected(or the equivalent, but with
auxilliaries) verb, or a simple infinitive(well, the directly following
verb has to be infinitive, but not the main verb).  It means that 'I
would have had to have been going to eat' is a perfectly  valid
construction, if a little hard to decipher, or even 'I would have had to
have been going to have to have eaten'.  At this point, we need
flowcharts.  Essentially, it refers to an event which has been deduced
to have happened, which is the speaker being, in the immediate future,
being obliged to eat.  I think.  Either way, it's a conditional perfect
imperative imperfect future imperative.

Is it possible in German or French to say 'Ich hätte gegessen haben
gemusst'(and yes, it did take me a little while to work out the word
order), or 'J'aurais dû avoir mangé', or, even better, 'Ich hätte
gegessen haben müssen geworden haben gemusst'(Yes, it's scary and
confusing), or 'J'aurais dû être allé devoir avoir mangé'

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