Re: OT: Super OT: Re: CHAT: JRRT

Quoting "Mark J. Reed" <markjreed@...>:

> On Sat, Mar 06, 2004 at 03:46:51PM +0100, Andreas Johansson wrote:
> > If your initial claim about Tolkien not being worth reading had been
> supplied
> > with a similar disclaimer, we'd never had this discussion. N
>
> Interesting verbal construction there:  "we'd never had".  Was that just
> a typo (for "we'd never have had", which is short for "we would never
> have had"), or a grammar difference popping up?  "We had never had", while
> a perfectly fine indicative tense, is not usable in that position, which
> requires the conditional (at least in my 'lect).
It's "we would never have had" with Swedish-style drop of an auxiliary (_vi
skulle aldrig ha haft_>_vi skulle aldrig haft_). It's one of the little
imperfections of my English I'm aware of, but nonetheless regularly fail to
catch.

                                                     Andreas