Re: Sumerian Lexicon

caeruleancentaur wrote:
> --- In conlang@yahoogroups.com, Stephen Mulraney <ataltanie@O...>
> wrote:

>>They all make me a bit wary, crazed loonies with such identifiable
>>plumage having been(**) publishing websites for as long as I've been
>>online.
>>(**) I swear, mostly literate reader of books and writer of standard
>>English though I be, I no longer trust myself on whether to
>>use "been" or "being" in this construction. I make no distinction in
>>speech, to the point of not being (aha!) able to tell even what the
>>underlying form is. My guess why this particular construction is so
>>fragile is that it's essentially a written form, that I'd rarely
>>have used in speech before my adolescent years. It's possible I
>>haven't forgotten the rule, but that I've never known it, too :).

> This construction is not at all unusual in spoken English IMO.  The
> correct phrasing should be "loonies...have been publishing
> websites..."  It is simply a present perfect progressive form of the
> verb.

That's not the form I'm looking for, though - I want to subordinate the
"loonies...have been publishing". The fact you (apparantly) don't
recognise this suggests to me that the phrasing I'm trying to use is
localised. To Ireland and Britain, perhaps. Or just to me, maybe. :-)

To indicate what I mean by subordination, I can give an example with another
tense/aspect pair (not progressive, this time). It's very forced, though:

Elephants having eaten all the peanut butter, we bought more.

s.
--