Hacker News Reader

Comment by AlbertCory | Hacker News Reader

> I didn’t necessarily could speak it well

This is actually a good example of users of the language adapting it to their needs. "didn't could speak" is not technically correct, but I'm not condemning it. You hear this in some Southern speakers especially, e.g.

"We used to would go to that park"

"That car needs fixed"

"I might could use those verbs correctly.

The more complicated verb tenses in English are pretty damn hard for people, even native speakers. So they adapt.

For the record, the "correct" English would be:

"I couldn't necessarily speak it well" or

"I didn't necessarily learn to speak it well"

View on HN

As a Southerner who would definitely say "I might could…", I would never say “I didn’t necessarily could speak it well”. That’s not how double modals work. (“I used to could…” seems marginally ok to me though.)

Also the “needs fixed” thing is not a Southern dialect property, I associate it more with like Pittsburgh.

I never heard either one in the South OR in Pittsburgh. I have heard them in California, though, which draws people from everywhere.

However, I think there's a Lyle Lovett song that goes "We used to would <verb phrase>."

What I like about it is: you understand it. Although it might strike you as "wrong" and I'd probably never say it myself, let alone write it.

> The more complicated verb tenses in English are pretty damn hard for people, even native speakers. So they adapt.

You might hold some consideration that for some people, this is how everyone around them talks. And thus they consider it perfectly acceptable, and it is not a consequence of the language being difficult for them.

> You might hold some consideration

so you're holding that up as snobbery, when it's the exact opposite?

> this is how everyone around them talks

but someone had to start. It didn't just come out of nowhere.

> but someone had to start. It didn't just come out of nowhere.

Weird grammar often comes from other languages, not from someone making a mistake. Is it possible that West African languages were an influence?

Grammar also often comes from a reanalysis process, involving a stage where what people are saying doesn't change, but how they view the internal structure of what they're saying does.

> so you're holding that up as snobbery, when it's the exact opposite?

I've offended you. That was not my intention. My apologies.

> but someone had to start. It didn't just come out of nowhere.

Your statement is painting everyone who talks that way with the same brush. It's unlikely that anyone you encounter who uses those phrases was responsible for coining them.

> painting everyone who talks that way with the same brush.

I don't see what point you're making. Everyone is influenced by the people around them. That's how we have dialects and regional speech patterns. So what?

I actually like those examples I gave. "We might be able to fix that" is certainly a lot more trouble to say than "we might could fix that" and people who say the latter are being a bit creative in their rule-breaking.

someone who expresses 'i might be able to drive' as 'quizás podría manejar' isn't creatively breaking the rules of english. they're speaking spanish. similarly, someone who says 'i might could drive' is not creatively breaking the rules of your dialect of english. they're following the rules of their dialect. you're insisting on treating it as a poor approximation of your own dialect, whether due to creativity or to simple incompetence. that is unbelievably arrogant and thus extremely annoying

double modals have been permitted by the rules of many dialects of american english for decades if not centuries, possibly calqued from scots or german. double modal dialects of english are also common in scotland. there's nothing rule-breaking about 'might could'. 'might could' is probably the absolute most common double modal in american english, so saying 'might could' is no more creative than saying 'eat supper'

https://ygdp.yale.edu/phenomena/multiple-modals and https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_modal_auxiliary_verb... has more information. http://artsandsciences.sc.edu/multimo/ is a database of observed uses of the construction, and https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal... is a recent paper advocating the unorthodox hypothesis that double modals originated independently in american english rather than being imported from scotland

> that is unbelievably arrogant and thus extremely annoying

Do you think maybe you're taking everything just a shade too seriously?

Like, taking offense at a simple expression of preference? Lighten up.

your preferences are fine with me; it's the bigoted cognitions you justify them with that piss me off

What bigoted cognitions are you talking about?

Challenge failed.

the bigotry is in your own mind and you're projecting it onto everyone else.

Well, a lot of modern standard English is made of left-overs from the mistakes people made when they couldn't understand or pronounce the earlier systems.

That's how language evolves.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com