Assume v. Presume

[everthewatcher]

Excellent. To which my response is: what the **** is a gerund?

It's a noun made from a verb by adding "-ing" , as in read/reading or practise/practising.

I couldn't spell until I was well into my 20's and started taking more interest. Spelling is easy to look up.

I have a knack of spotting spelling errors in things I'm not reading so it's clearly a pattern thing and can even work upside down. I've not seen it given as an Asperger's/ASD thing but it's possible. Of course it doesn't work on something I've written until it's too late to correct it.

The longer this goes on the more danger of me falling foul of Muphry's Law...

 

[everthewatcher]

I'd endorse that. But I find it even more confusing. I was a product of that experiment the "initial teaching alphabet". So that's mucked up my spelling a bit, but not to Mike2's standard.

Fortunately I missed that, being born in '55, and I remember thinking ITA was a stupid idea at the time.

 

[EEPhil]

Spelling is easy to look up

There's usually a second tab open in my browser for the purpose.

 

[EEPhil]

The longer this goes on the more danger of me falling foul of Muphry's Law...

Never heard of that one before. You learn something new every day.

 

[Black Hole]

It's a noun made from a verb by adding "-ing" , as in read/reading or practise/practising.

But I thought you said...

... or is this a case of

me falling foul of Muphry's Law

 

[everthewatcher]

But I thought you said...

... or is this a case of

Nope. The verb is practise so adding -ing makes gives the gerund practising. It doesn't change the 's' to a 'c' to give practicing.

He started to practise law two years ago.
He has been practising law for to years.

 

[Black Hole]

So it's not a noun then (just to be picky). You couldn't put "the practising".

It's a noun made from a verb by adding "-ing"

...doesn't seem to be an adequate definition of a gerund.

 

[everthewatcher]

Never heard of that one before. You learn something new every day.

Makes a change having someone look it up instead of pointing out the assumed spelling error.

 

[Black Hole]

I had to look it up too - it's a self-referential thing; I like those, neat.

Like "there are too errors in this sentence".

 

[everthewatcher]

So it's not a noun then (just to be picky). You couldn't put "the practising".

...doesn't seem to be an adequate definition of a gerund.

OK, it's a word formed by adding -ing to a verb and which is treated as a noun. Is that better?

A little light reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerund

 

[everthewatcher]

I had to look it up too - it's a self-referential thing; I like those, neat.

Like "there are too errors in this sentence".

That part of your brain that's not on your side will always try to slip in an error.

 

[everthewatcher]

He has been practising law for to years.

Had to happen.

 

[Deleted member 473]

He started to practise law two years ago.
He has been practising law for to years.

Murphy's Law? The second is a present participle, surely?

He played the bagpipes.
Practising made everyone shriek!

 

[everthewatcher]

Murphy's Law? The second is a present participle, surely?

Looks like I screwed up.

 

[Deleted member 473]

I loved grammar/syntax at school. (A grammar school in the 60s.)

New programming languages always used to be accompanied by a syntax diagram or diagrams in the past. That was the way compilers or interpreters tokenized the input ready for interpretation. BNF? Anyone remember that?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backus–Naur_form

So elegant and unambiguous.

The trouble is, with English, it is just a hotch potch of random rules, no logic to them. My brain rebels at that. Even the syntax for its tokens, words, is a stream of random rules, defying logic.

As for noun, verb, adjective, connective, participle, gerund, etc, what a mess of fuzzy logic!

Stop! An action word. Verb.

Stop. A thing. Noun.

Quiet. A noun, a verb, an adjective.

As for the nonsense of direct and indirect objects, try two place predicates? How about n place predicates for

Bill hit Ben on the head with a mallet in Cardiff.

hit(person1, person2, where, weapon, location)

 

[Black Hole]

BNF? Anyone remember that?

Yep.

 

[Deleted member 473]

No gerunds in BNF.

 

[EEPhil]

BNF? Anyone remember that?

I remember seeing it mentioned in various books but I never made sense of it - mainly because I never needed to use it.

 

[Deleted member 473]

I remember seeing it mentioned in various books but I never made sense of it - mainly because I never needed to use it.

But if you programmed, and it wasn't just Fortran with GOTO, it was essential to learning

Is this a correctly formed identifier?
Is this a correctly formed program?
Is this a for loop?
Is this statement well formed?

It analyses every concept in a language and gives an exact description of what is and is not allowed.

It was sometimes given as flow diagrams.

 

[EEPhil]

it was essential to learning

Really? I've programmed in FORTRAN, Pascal, C, C++, Java, various assembly languages (and Basic of course) and never found it essential.