Questions here in the forum, and, especially, in the comments below each shorty, are often of the type:
- why is this in tense x
- shouldn’t this be said this…other way
- why no article in this sentence
i.e. they are about parsing/analysing a sentence. Answers are often “that’s not the tense you think it is” (often the sneaky future subjunctive), or “either is good”.
So, I’d like to propose a sentence of the month feature where a member of the PP team takes a sentence from the site and explains exactly how it is constructed and what other options we might have for an equivalent meaning.
To give a live example, my review currently has in it:
-
Ela previu que isto ia acontecer
-
She predicted that this would happen
Deepl has a variety of suggestions for “she predicted that this would happen”, none of which are the PP version. The discussion here would be around how “ia acontecer” is formed, and how this differs from “iria acontecer” or “aconteceria”. It might also be a good trigger for a reminder about the various ways of saying “this”, and so on.
I realise that too much parsing can get a bit geeky, but as an infrequent thing I think such a feature would be very useful. Especially the bit about other ways of expressing the same idea (eg don’t use the future, use the present because you already know that etc etc).
Bin the idea if you’ve tried it before, or if it seems plain dumb, but I, for one, would welcome it.
