They had to have that specially made? The sentence is in the past tense. Since English lacks verbs for situations in which person A does something for person B on person B's request, a rather long and awkward structure is used instead: to have

MrPedantic wrote: Even though the form of the past subjunctive is the same as the form of the simple past, you can distinguish the two by their function: 1. He went to London. 2. If he went to London, he would... Are we not talking about

.... -0- ok, let's put it this way: GB is nothing more than a module in the generative grammar, to be put on a par with such other modules of the theory as X', Case theory or the Theta Theory, although it has been quite incorrectly treated as

Hi all Hi TS. As you said, we don't know how to define present and future. But we can strictly define a grammatical category , in terms of morphology. A grammatical category consists of a paradigmatic opposition of morphological forms. Thus we

Dylan Nicholson wrote on 03 Jun 2004: Most grammar books will identify more than two tenses because ... each verb has only two indicative forms: present and past. So who gets to decide that a tense is identified solely by a 'verb ending'?

There are two useful features of current English spelling which a reform would lose, and which I think are worth ... understand unusual or novel words. The second is that changing spelling would make the writing of past centuries less accessible.

If it were feasible, would you reform any aspect of the English language other than spelling? By 'feasible', I assume you mean 'possible for you to magically change in an instant the way all English speakers use their language'.