Artemis :corgi:🍑:therian:

Grammatically correct English makes no sense most of the time.

I'm thinking about the fact that when you're talking about a "not to be" in the past tense, it's "was not" if you're talking about something that happened, but "were not" if you're talking about a possibility/something theoretical.

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the Hearth :ms_agender_flag:

@artemis this particular feature seeems to be slowly disappearing from the language though.
-F

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Artemis :corgi:🍑:therian:

@Felthry Fair enough! Common usage definitely affects definition; I'm just considering the fact that there's not really an explanation for why it is/was a rule in the first place.

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the Hearth :ms_agender_flag:
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@artemis there probably is some history to it. it's called the subjunctive if you're not aware and want to look it up
-F

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godspeed you! big animal :qtmlem: :qtmlem: :qtmlem:

@Felthry @artemis the "were" in "he were (subj)" and "they were" used to be different! in this case, you have to go back to proto-germanic (btw an old language is "proto" if it wasn't written, but its forms are deduced from its descendants)

anyway in this case, the forms in question were "wēzī" and "wēzun" respectively. over time the suffixes got worn down until the words ended up identical (the z→r change is kinda common too. it also happened in latin)

look at all these forms that got worn down to, what, five? en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconst maybe you notice there is nothing that looks like "be" there. because haha just kidding "to be" is actually the result of two older words merging and there's even more en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Reconst (edit: i should mention if you go even FURTHER it's actually three words which is why "is" and "was" look so different too)

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the Hearth :ms_agender_flag:

@niss @artemis oh yeah that happened to go and went too, went used to be the past tense of a different word, wend, which is synonymous with go, and i guess people liked saying went more than saying goed or whatever the past tense of go used to be
-F

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the Hearth :ms_agender_flag:

@niss @artemis it also happened with the copula in Latin too, with at least three words i think?, which is why you have such disparate forms as "sum", "est", "eram", and "fuī"
-F

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godspeed you! big animal :qtmlem: :qtmlem: :qtmlem:

@Felthry @artemis yeah, exactly

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godspeed you! big animal :qtmlem: :qtmlem: :qtmlem:

@Felthry @artemis oh sorry quick correction you can go a little bit less far back: they are still different in proto-*west*-germanic, which is merely the common ancestor of english, german, dutch, etc, but not the scandinavian languages. (wāʀī and wāʀun. at this point there were two "r" sounds because the z/r thing is in progress, so one is transcribed "r" and one "ʀ")

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