Vitanuova for 2004 October 12

Vintage Computer Festival

I'll be in Rio de Janeiro, but the Vintage Computer Festival is coming back in Mountain View in early November, at the Computer History Museum.

The grammarians' spam

I've gotten a couple of spam messages in the past month from some English teachers in Hong Kong. They're asking for people in the West to help back them up on a point about English grammar. Apparently, English grammar books available in Hong Kong misrepresent the rule about when you should use the present perfect and when you should use the simple past. The teachers sending the spam know the rule, but their students seem to consider the textbooks better authority than the teachers -- and won't listen when the teachers try to teach the correct rule. So the teachers decided to send out a spam appeal for native English speakers to try to get the correct rule into a publication so it would be persuasive to Hong Kong students learning English as a second language.

In my view, the present perfect is forbidden when the verb is qualified by an adverbial referring to a time period, except if the time period includes the present.

So, for future reference, here's the way the Oxford English Grammar (ed. Sidney Greenbaum) puts the matter, which agrees with my intuition as a native English speaker:

5.27 Present perfect

[...]

The present perfect [tense] competes with the past [tense], which occurs more frequently. The present perfect is generally excluded if there are expressions that refer to a specific time in the past. Contrast:

[24] I worked in New York in 1990.
[24a] I worked (or have worked) in New York for many years.

On the other hand, the past is generally excluded in the presence of expressions that refer to a period of time extending to the time of speaking or hearing.

[24b] I have worked in New York since 1990.

I hope that's authoritative enough, and I hope that helps get the English teachers to stop sending spam.

It's interesting to consider what happens if the period of time described in the adverbial includes time up to but not including the present. Perhaps changing from one tense to another can be a way of indicating an important change, or even serve as a performative. This reminds me of a significant use of tense in the Aeneid that's hard to capture concisely in English:

"quo res summa loco, Panthu? quam prendimus arcem?"
vix ea fatus eram gemitu cum talia reddit:
"venit summa dies et ineluctabile tempus
Dardaniae. fuimus Troes, fuit Ilium et ingens
gloria Teucrorum [...]"

Aeneid II, 322-6.

I asked him: "Where's the heart of things, Panthus? what fort should we fight for?"

I had hardly said this when he groaned and answered:

"The final day and unavoidable time has dawned for us. We Trojans have been, Troy has been, and her people's great glory as well."

(Some people say: "Troy has been, and we have been Trojans." Since the Latin is so concise, it might even be better to say "Troy was and we Trojans were".)