Re: French question -- tenses

On Tue, 11 Jul 2000, DOUGLAS KOLLER wrote:

> From: "Oskar Gudlaugsson"
>
> > >From: DOUGLAS KOLLER
>
> > >So, like, yesterday I'm eating this duck, you know, and it's, like, sooo
> > >good, and then this man I've never met before comes up to me and, like,
> > >pukes on my shoe, and I'm like, "Ew!".
>
> > Show me a Western language which doesn't allow a use of present tense like
> > that. I think most less linguistically aware people wouldn't even think of
> > it as language-specific. I guess what I'm saying is: it's normal.
>
> I'm not so much balking at tense usage as the rest of the sentence, and, as
> a non-native speaker without exposure to French teens or "universitaires",
> I've never heard French people speak this way. Still, glossing "je mange" as
> "I ate" rubs me the wrong way intuitively. Without the above allowance, (ie:
> you are there) I don't see how it works. But I'm more concerned about the
> sentence as a whole, which sounds (to me) rather ungrammatical. Native
> speakers, where can you be?
It sounds ungrammatical because I was being cute.  It's not a direct quote
from the text in question, just an example of the sort of thing I'm
running across.

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