Subj : Tenses...  2.
To   : Ardith Hinton
From : Anton Shepelev
Date : Sat Jun 06 2020 16:55:16

Ardith Hinton to Anton Shepelev:

> AS>  Addison in a psalm of his addresses God:
>
> AS>       I knew thou wert not slow to hear,
> AS>       Nor impotent to save.
>
> AS>  I don't think that substituting `art' for `wert' would
> AS>  harm the sound and rythm so much as to justify `wert',
> AS>  were it ungrammatical...
>
>            No.  But I think you're referring to Joseph Addison,
> who lived from 1672-1719 & who wrote at least two hymns based on
> a rewording of Old Testament psalms.

Yes.

> Bishop R. Heber said "...which wert, and art, and evermore shalt
> be" WRT God in 1827.  I'm not sure how much to attribute to
> liturgical anachronism ..

I see no fault with bishop Heber's usage, for with these words he
addresses God (rather than saying it WRT Him), and therefore uses
the second-person verbs. Why he wrote "which" instead of `who' is
another question. It is probably permissible because `which' is
more general than "who", and, together with `that', used be employed
to personal and impersonal objects alike, but Cf. another address:
"Our Father, Who art in Heaven...", where the verb is in the second
person too, but the prounoun is personal.

> as Fowler puts it... or how much weight to assign to the idea
> that when we speak of an immutable truth the verb tenses should
> still be in agreement.  :-)

Well, even these days the prevailing tendency is to have them
agree, as a quick search for "knew the Earth was round" in
Boogle Gooks shows .

> AH>  We've often had people say to us, in casual conversation,
> AH>  "I didn't know you're a teacher."  I doubt they are the
> AH>  only people who do this....  :-)
>
> AS>  Hardly so, but such is the nature of causual conversation
> AS>  that one has little time, and even less desire, to ensure
> AS>  grammatical accuracy.
>
>            Agreed.  When folks are speaking extemporaneously they
> tend to make grammatical errors they probably wouldn't have made
> if they'd had more time to think about the wording.  In an
> otherwise fruitless search of my own reference books, however, I
> found this description of something else:  "well established but
> controversial".  I think the same might also be said of the
> above....  ;-)

If the alternative is uncontrovesional yet unestablished, then I
prefer the former :-) I have failed to what the esteemed Goold
Brown has to say upon the matter on account of the sheer volume of
his magnum opus.

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