• khannie@lemmy.world
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    4 days ago

    It needs a comma.

    All the good faith I had had, had had no effect.

    Essentially “all the food faith I previously had, didn’t have any effect”.

    Good God English is an awful language.

    • Classy@sh.itjust.works
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      4 days ago

      I’m pretty sure it is grammatically correct with no comma. The version you provided is a comma splice.

      To slightly change the tense, All the good faith that I had had no effect is grammatically correct with no comma, so the gerund form should also not need a comma.

      • khannie@lemmy.world
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        4 days ago

        Perhaps. Regardless it’s outlandish abuse of the tongue IMO and definitely would benefit from the comma because nobody’s going to just bang out 4 had’s in a row in speech without a pause without a justifiable slap across the chops and possibly a challenge to a duel.

        “But your honour, he said ‘had’ four times on the trot without pause”

        “Case dismissed”

    • abbadon420@lemm.ee
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      4 days ago

      It doesn’t need a comma, it needs restructuring. When phrasing it like this, it is customary to add a comma between two adjacent verbs. You could even argue that the first part is an introductory phrase, which would explain the comma too.

      • khannie@lemmy.world
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        4 days ago

        True enough but I feel like English has more quirks than other languages though I acknowledge that may be bias.

        I used to have near fluent Irish way back when and I don’t recall any shenanigans like this (again I acknowledge I may not have been presented with them). I feel like most other languages have a more clearly defined set of pronunciation rules too.

        Irish looks horrific (Siobhán is shiv-awn for example) but very very closely follows pronunciation rules so that pronunciation would be no surprise to a native reading it for the first time. English sure as fuck does not follow rules like that.

        Near. Neat. Book. Boot. Etc.

        (Some small subset of Irish folks do say “boo-k” though)

        • pyre@lemmy.world
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          3 days ago

          maybe I should have clarified: not every language has quirks in the same ways. German has weird articles that make no sense. French has different pluralization rules for up to four objects. e: this is probably wrong but there are many languages with different pluralizations for two objects (a dual) and for any number more than two. there are remnants of this in English as well, in words like both, either and neither.

          But even of you just want to think about writing: German makes super long words that look monstrous by mushing words together. French doesn’t pronounce half the letters in its spelling. Arabic doesn’t really have vowels but instead uses diacritics that are often omitted so you have to be really familiar with the language to read at all.

            • pyre@lemmy.world
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              3 days ago

              well I can’t find a source for it now. maybe I’m misremembering. I read it in the book The Universal History of Numbers by Georges Ifrah. maybe it was referring to some remnant exception, maybe it was about another language. can’t verify it cause the book is not nearby right now. maybe I confused it with four different ways to pluralize in French (s, x, aux, none) idk.

              • zaphod@sopuli.xyz
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                3 days ago

                Oh, you mean word endings for plurals, well those depend on the gender and the singular word ending. They can be a bit confusing, because they’re not always regular like local -> locaux, but naval -> navals. You have that in other languages too, even in english, like goose -> geese, but moose -> moose, mouse -> mice, house -> houses, and so on.

                • pyre@lemmy.world
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                  3 days ago

                  yeah that’s my point. language isn’t math, it changes over time organically and therefore is bound to have quirks. some of it is even inorganic, like when English linguists wanted to spell words of Latin origin in a way that reflects it.

      • khannie@lemmy.world
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        4 days ago

        You’re welcome. :) Took me a minute tbh. Not sure if the wine I’ve had helped or hindered. It’s 2:30am here.