Comment on Am I going crazy, or has people's spelling gotten awful lately?
jbrains@sh.itjust.works 4 days agoThe distinction between simple past and past participle is disappearing in English. I’m curious whether it will be considered quaint to distinguish them before I’m dead.
Flamekebab@piefed.social 4 days ago
I'm always perplexed when I see porn videos with titles that use the continuous present rather than the simple present. One would have thought that the simple present would be the basic stuff for English as a second language, rather than the much less useful continuous present.
jbrains@sh.itjust.works 4 days ago
I speak a couple of languages in which there is no continuous present, but rather they use phrases such as “I sit and study Swedish” to mean “I’m studying Swedish (as in right now, that’s the task I’m doing)” or “I am in the process of reading a book”. They don’t change the form of the verb to highlight this continuous aspect, so perhaps they aren’t used to it.
Add to that that the continuous aspect in English is surprisingly complicated and arbitrary. If you try to nail down rules for how and when to use it, you might struggle. 😉 Folks struggling to use it correctly might be overcorrecting or merely confused.
There are, I’m sure, other reasons, but this is enough to account for some of what you’re seeing.