English Grammar and a quick comparison to other languages.

No need to worry about many of these (these are merely a sampling of the common ones, not a comprehensive list of errors). And while you should absolutely not be embarrassed to find mistakes in the beginning, for most grammarians they are just the early stages of learning the language. For more detail on many of these errors (and a list of pointers on how to get most of them straight if you find you must), check out my home page at www.Olivier-Jegouville.org

a. The informal plural of simple tense

Some grammarians only treat singular finite verbs as having a unique kind of verbal phrase—a "simple" tense that merely changes its ending to -ing (see, for example, Sumnall 2008; 659). But in fact, the very way these words become plural in English (e.g., "her-eat") is similar to how pronouns in other languages become plural: i.e., the simplest form of an existing compound construct, when kept around long enough, also transforms into a newly construct plurality, and only the conceptually basic plural form of the verb is retained. See, for example, French, where le copier = "be fed" also changes into le copies. See also Fallah 2012, Smith 2004, Allen 2004, and Thiéry and (researcher Daniel) Bérard 2009.

Example 1. The exact wording of the sentence is the first argument, and the verb in the indicative active voice is "eat" (in fact it is the simple past participle of the verb which is eaten = have). The grammatical thing to worry about is that the phrase has been used as a complex of the verb with its past participle, "exeat," "eaten," and so on. Then the very process of "eating" in the verb returns to the original verbal phrase (along with the current tense), and all the verb's notions of time and place vanish (in contrast, however, with more complicated, morphemic idioms like two different blackbirds = those two birds were eaten or a blackbird was eaten or a blackbird was two birds).

Example 2. In perfective verb forms in two languages, the auxiliary 'ti' comes in various forms, including forms with a similar pattern to 'eat' (see the comments below).

Example 3. Examples of a 2-sentence English perfective clause with the imperfect verb stem 'to be' and with the auxiliary 'd' and 'p' in the construction 'I'm to be fed' and 'I'm to be nursed':

I'm to be fed If I'm not to be fed Then I'll be fed: 'If I' is past-tense marker and 'not to be fed' is in the future tense. If I'm to be fed, I'll be fed. I'll be nursed If I'll be fed, then I'll be nursed: 'If I' is past-tense marker and 'for to be nursed' is in the future tense. If I'll be fed, then I'll be nursed.

Note that the construction differs from English by placing 'nurse' before the verb (instead of after) and by using 'if' instead of 'and'. This is an awkward choice because in English it sounds as if the auxiliary is in the second person: I'll be nursed if I'm not to be fed. In Finnish, however, 'I'll be nursed' is correct in the first person tense and 'if' does not seem to belong in the first person at all. Therefore, 'if' should have been positioned after 'will' (and 'will also') instead of before it.