I was thinking of sentences such as “If I would have a million dollars, I would buy a fancy car.” I was taught in school that only “had” was acceptable in the if clause of that sentence, but it seems the usage of “would” is not uncommon.
I have never heard it. Is it an Americanism? And, if it is, is it possibly a borrowing from German/Yiddish? In my mind, the only way I can imagine hearing that sentence spoken is by someone with a Central European accent.
A colleague of mine is German but spent five years in Australia, and says constructions like that are used there all the time. Personally, I have indeed heard it from non-native speakers, but I’m pretty sure I’ve also heard it on American TV shows, even though I can’t recall a specific instance. I had a discussion about it with British friends once, and they seemed sufficiently disapproving of the practice to imply that they had heard it in the UK too.
I have lived in Australia for the past 11 years, and have never heard it. I have never heard it in Britain or Ireland either, to my recollection.
Oh, OK, yes, we do that with the subjunctive in some dialects. Not that sentence, but others.
“If I would have turned left at the light, I might have avoided that accident,” instead of, “If I had turned left at the light, I might have avoided that incident.”
Nobody fucks with the Jesus.
So you’d say the construction with “would” in the “if” clause is common (though still incorrect) in third conditionals, but not second conditionals?
Now I’m going to have to look up what a second or third conditional is :).
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The example you gave is unfamiliar to me as an East-Coast American. But there are definitely many dialects I am innocent of.
As an aside, in the example provided by foolsguinea, I think I would say it like this (incorrectly, of course):
“If I’d’a’ turned left at the light, I might’a’ avoided that accident,” instead of, “If I had turned left at the light, I might have avoided that incident.”
The “might’a’” part is clearly from “might have”, but the “I’d’a’” part puzzles me. Is it “if I had have” or “if I would have”? Both are clunky, but that’s the way we say it in Jersey.
“I’d’a’ done something different” means “I would have done something different”
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If it works as in Spanish, and from what I remember from my Brazilian coworkers it did, it means “the Sara that you first think of when I say ‘Sara’”. For Spanish it’s considered “ungrammatical”, but still done all the time; this often leads to people emphasizing the article to indicate “yeah yeah it’s incorrect yeah yeah I was awake in class, but you know what I mean and most importantly who I mean”.
La Madonna. (Louise Ciccone; note that in Spanish, images of Our Lady aren’t called madonnas unless they’re in Italy and then you specify which one you’re talking about).
La Garbo. (Greta).
If my mother says la Rita: her best friend. If someone on TV says la Rita: Hayworth neé Cansino.
Cf. “The Donald”
Trump. Because the more famous one is el pato Donald.
How would “Ich bin Christlich” be translated to english?
According to this — 5 Ridiculous Cold War Myths You Learned in History Class | Cracked.com —
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asserting that “Ich bin ein Berliner” implies “I am a jelly doughnut” is like claiming that “I am a New Yorker” implies “I am a weekly literary magazine.”
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No one would misunderstand Kennedy’s intent
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people from Berlin don’t call those pastries Berliners anyway.
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The difference between “Ich bin Berliner” and “Ich bin ein Berliner” is more like the difference between “I am from New York” and “I am a New Yorker”
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The whole jelly doughnut thing originated in a throwaway joke in a novel published in the 1980s.
It means “I am Christian”, as opposed to “I am a Christian”. It’s not so much a statement of identity or participation as a statement about your character, philosophy, behaviour, etc. It might be translated as “I am Christ-like”.
Err, yes? Although many people want to read a lot into the “Berliner”/“ein Berliner” distinction, both are perfectly fine and mean basically the same thing, but I would maintain that there is a very subtle difference in emphasis.
I almost never hear that construction. But then, I don’t get out much. I’d use the latter phrase, ‘If I had turned left at the light, I might have avoided that incident.’ On the rare occasion I hear the if/would construction it’s usually from a person whose mouth gets ahead of his or her brain (e.g., someone who is nervous about being interviewed by a video crew for the news), or if they have the same dialect that gives us ‘I had gone to the store’ instead of ‘I went to the store.’
“I had gone to the store,” is standard English, though. Past perfect.
It’s a point of grammar that seems to be taught to ESL students, but I’ve never been taught it myself as an English speaker, either in grammar school, high school, or college (and I was an English major, as well as having taken courses in copy editing.)
In my experience, native English speakers quite often get the verb forms in conditionals jumbled up. Wikipedia has a decent run-down on conditionals, their forms, including the “zero conditional” and “mixed conditionals.”
I really wish, as much “English” as I had in school, that conditional and subjunctive had been covered at some point. Not at all.
My mother taught ESL, so I got some smattering of it from her, but I’d never heard of zero conditional, etc., before this thread.