Re: Story - TCOAIW

Tristan wrote:

> Christophe Grandsire wrote:
>
>> En réponse à Adrian Morgan <morg0072@...>:
>>
>>> I'm not sure what you mean. A search shows eight instances of words
>>> ending in apostrophe-d, including five in the first scene, which is
>>> not surprising as this scene describes events that occur before the
>>> story begins which naturally incurs the use of the past perfect. This
>>> proportion is by no means unusual for fictional or other types of
>>> non-formal prose. I'm surprised that you find it awkward; expanding
>>> it to "he had", etc would look inappropriately formal, IMO.
>>>
>> Well, I'm only a L2 English speaker, but I agree with Teoh that this
>> 'd looks
>> awkward. First, it's an ambiguous abbreviation
>>
> Only in isolation; when in context you can understand it.
>
>> (it can be "had" or "would", and
>> somehow I consider it is more often "would" than "had", so I tend to
>> translate
>> it as "would", and only when I see the next word I realise my
>> mistake, so it
>> tends to break my reading pace).
>>
> Why expand 'he'd' into either 'he had' or 'he would', anyway? (In fact,
> when reading something that says 'he had', I *contract* it into 'he'd'.)
> If you say 'he'd left before you came', I don't bother turning that into
> 'he had left before you came'; the word is 'he'd'. And anyway, I think
> I'm more likely to use 'd=had than 'd=would; I can't contrive a natural
> sounding sentence with it. But perhaps that's just because I'm trying
> too hard to contrive one...
Okay, yes. I'm wrong... I was trying too hard. 'He'd like to go now'
etc. That was easy enough. And I wouldn't decontract that into 'he would
like to go now' to understand it, either. Same as I wouldn't turn 'you'
into 'thou' when singular, or 'don't' into 'do not'.

Tristan.

Replies