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Comment by exmadscientist | Hacker News Reader

> I will have lived

This is one of those constructions that works better in French than in English. It has future tense and perfect aspect (so, "future perfect"), which gets muddled in English since English generally muddles tense and aspect.

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I think it works fine in English grammatically. We say "will have (verb)" all the time, after all. The thing that is tricky about that sentence is that one doesn't usually use "to live" on its own in English. Like, you don't say "I have lived", you add something else to the sentence to make it feel complete. I suppose it's different in French.

What about it do you think doesn’t work in English? I think it works perfectly (although it is possible I’m reading too much into it given the context)—he’s saying he’ll be dead, but he’s focusing on the life he lived instead. I think there’s an element of resistance to it as well; they can kill him but they can’t take away the fact that he has lived.

As a western US speaker, I think we would let idioms and other special cases override the grammatical interpretation you are stating.

To me, "lived" is used metaphorically so often that to say "I lived" or "I have lived" does not, by default, connote death. It just reflects on an especially vivacious moment.

I'm confused by all this nuance about verb conjugations. The idea is to say "today I lived (but also am not alive anymore)" as I interpret it. Would it not suffice to say something along the lines of "by the end of today, I will have had lived". Of course, I know the response, this would not suffice, some sort of Anthony Bourdain-ish romanticism about a particular language and the romance of complicated French verb conjugations.

> Adjectives in English absolutely have to be in this order: opinion-size-age-shape-colour-origin-material-purpose Noun. So you can have a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife. But if you mess with that word order in the slightest you’ll sound like a maniac. It’s an odd thing that every English speaker uses that list, but almost none of us could write it out.

Foreign languages always sound strange. There are rules that are invisible even to the native speakers who know them. The romance is not in knowing them, but the fun of figuring them out.

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