Thanks for your attempt at clarifying for me Piers.
I suspect I trod onto dangerous territory as regards the thread
content :-(
but I was curious to know -linguistically- why the present perfect,
which might match the present tense (is) in the second clause, had not
been used.
I was just trying to check my own command of the language(s) and I
thought the use of the preterit aka simple past "did" was unnecessary.
This unless one intended to report on some event in a series they
witnessed in common, or wanted to stress the fact that the speaker
(McLuhan here) is now actually dead.
Did vs Has V-EN? My questionning remains open :-)
Early morning renewed thanks
Amities
Philippe
Le 13 nov. 14 à 23:53, piers@xxxxxxxx a écrit :
Oh dear, Philippe. As if reported speech were not a big enough
problem (on
which young Mr Barker is entirely correct, even if not well
understood),
the use of auxiliary verbs in English is even trickier.
As best I can explain it 'did' is used in English where one would
use the
past imperfect tense in French. But I am not sure ygat *was* yiur
wuestion!
Piers
On 13 Nov 2014 21:21, "philippe.amard" <philippe.amard@xxxxxx> wrote:
That was a real question from a non native photographer ;-)
Amities
Philippe
Le 13 nov. 14 à 22:13, ChrisB a écrit :
“Did”?
It’s probably time to move back to photography, Phlippe. I
haven’t seen
any of your work for a while.
Chris
On 13 Nov 2014, at 19:40, philippe.amard <philippe.amard@xxxxxx>
wrote:
Hasn't McLuhan said the mangle is the message?
Why 'did' BTW?
Philippe
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