Actually, there's another thing that annoys me about the Tomorrow books

[conuly]

And any other books written by Australian authors. It's irrational, and it's definitely not in keeping with descriptivism, but it always jars me when they use the word "meant" where an American wouldn't. "Isn't Vietnam meant to be America's greatest failure or something?" "Isn't he meant to be ten or eleven?" "I think you're meant to have a license".

I know, I know, it's not really any different from "supposed to be", but it always, always takes me by surprise and forces me to spend a few seconds re-reading so it makes sense. Why this item and not any others? Beats me. I'm not proud of it, but there it is.

Comments

[fred_mouse]

It would never have occurred to me that there is anything odd in those constructions!

The equivalent Americanism for me is 'gotten'. I realise it gets used all the time, but to me, it *is not a word*.

[conuly]

It's not really an Americanism, since it predates the colonization of America by quite some time.

/pedant

[archangelbeth]

...how else would you make the construction of "He'd gotten up at sunrise" or "so that's when we discovered the toddler had gotten up in the middle of the night and spent the rest of it coloring the walls with their new crayons" if you don't use "gotten"??? Are there people who use "had got"?????? *reels around going 'no no no no no'* That would be like saying "Had be" instead of "had been"!

[rachelkachel]

I think the equivalent would be "had was" which sounds even more ridiculous. But yes, I believe Brits (and others?) say "had got". There are plenty of other verbs that use the same form for those two tenses - thought, told, loved, for example. It's just that for "got", we didn't switch to the simpler form when they did.

[archangelbeth]

Well, yes, Brits do weird things with the language, true. Like, they drop the ' from 'round when they mean "around"! And the whole first floor/ground floor confusion.

Hmph.

[conuly]

Everybody does weird things with language. That's what makes it so fascinating!

[conuly]

They say "had got". But they also have "forgotten" as a word, so yeah.

[archangelbeth]

Do they only use it as an adjective? The Forgotten Tree? And say, "I had forgot you were allergic to oak leaves"?

*clutches head*

[fred_mouse]

Weirdly, that one has survived as a verb -- 'They had forgotten that they had training', but equally, I might say 'They forgot that they had training'. They are kind of functionally equivalent, and I think I'm more likely to use the latter than the former. So, like 'got' it doesn't need the 'had' there.

[archangelbeth]

Oh, but "he had gotten up before dawn" and "he got up before dawn" are very different tenses! So is "had forgotten" vs "forgot."

Had X is Past Perfect, while just Xed is simply Past.
(http://esl.fis.edu/grammar/rules/pastperf.htm is also good.)

They are not functionally equivalent! Casual speech can slip around between past-perfect and past all it wants, true, but if writing flashbacks (in non-first person view, especially), one has to nail the tense and not let it slip. *waves nailgun around*

[conuly]

Different aspects, not tenses. English properly only has two tenses anyway.

[archangelbeth]

Okay -- the tense thing has been used interchangeably in my presence when I was more absorbent, so I will no doubt get it wrong more than once... >_>

[alasse_irena]

Yes - I'd say "he had got up before dawn" for the one, and "he got up before dawn" for the second. No different to the way you do it for many other verbs: "he kept it" vs "he had kept it", "we lost" vs "we had lost" etc.

[archangelbeth]

*clings to her "had verb-tens" possessively* Not to use "had gotten" sounds so very wrong to my ears.

What about the Reported Speech variation up there? You'd say, "She said her child had forgot about the class project"?

...I'm going to have to shake my UK friend the next time I see her online and wail about this. O;>

[fred_mouse]

...and now I've been paying attention to it, I've realised that I do use it with forgotten, *but* only in the form "I'd forgotten" -- "I had forgotten" would be overly formal. (There are a number of phrasings that Canadian family use where my reaction is roughly that they are using archaic language, and it all comes down to the way that the Australians I associate with use the language is all about the contractions, while the Canadians I associate with don't do that).

But 'gotten' is the kind of unacceptable that comes down to classist and ageist judgements.

[fred_mouse]

I'd say "He got up at sunrise" and "...the toddler got up in the middle of the night" or possibly "the toddler had got up in the middle of the night". Basically, we don't include the 'had' there that you do -- one verb, rather than two. I suspect it means that there is a verb tense that has been abandoned.

[conuly]

An aspect - had verbed is the past perfect. Verbed is just the simple past.

[fred_mouse]

I *think* that there is a trend in Australia to abandonment of the past perfect. I've done proof reading for Americans and Australians, and in the writing of the former, I find myself removing 'extraneous' verbs that I don't in the writing of the latter. Which means that this is something I'm going to have to watch out for, because it means I'm changing the register of what is being written.

[fred_mouse]

From where I'm standing, the only place it turns up is in American television/cinema, so if *feels* like an Americanism! I wasn't aware of it as a word other than that.

[conuly]

LOL, I get you! But there are a few things that irk me metalinguistically, and those mostly involve saying that Americans innovated something that we didn't, or that the British form is older when it's not. (See also: the great herb/herb dispute. I get that the h-less pronunciation sounds silly to Brits, and trust me, the h-full pronunciation sounds silly to us, and it doesn't really matter, but just fyi, our form is older.)

[fred_mouse]

I know that there are lots of things that look like oddities in the American use of language that are historically older, it had just never occurred to me that 'gotten' was one of them!

[alasse_irena]

I think currently it happens in American English more that other Englishes, but "gotten" used to be a thing in Britain too.

[fred_mouse]

Sorry for the late reply, but I have a question -- in your experience, is it a class marker in Britain? And if so, which way? Because it occurs to me that I can hear the phrase 'Gotten to the bottom of things' in a very RP kind of accent, and it sounds perfectly normal, but here I associate it as a 'lower' class thing.

[alasse_irena]

I'm Australian and not British, so I can't really say. All I know is that it's something which was in common use a few centuries ago and fell out.

In Australia I think it's not a class marker so much as a generational one: younger people are reasonably likely to use "gotten", where older people will tend not to.

[fred_mouse]

I'm also Australian -- I very much code it as a class marker! I wonder if it a regional thing.