• lugal@lemmy.ml
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    7 months ago

    You convinced me that you’re just stupid. Subjects don’t have tense, it’s the verb that carries that information

    • nondescripthandle@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      7 months ago

      You’re the one who brought up the what if subjects have tense statement, not me. You’ve convinced me you just want to argue semantically. It’s still not clear that OP wants to exclude the past otherwise they would have used ‘is killing’ instead of ‘kills’

      • lugal@lemmy.ml
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        7 months ago

        You said:

        Thats because the tense has to agree with the subject

        I said that (1.) this is wrong and (2.) even if it was right, your statement was still wrong.

        • nondescripthandle@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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          7 months ago

          Its funny you wont respond to my argument where I say if OP wanted to exclude the past without saying so they should have used ‘is killing’ instead of ‘kills’ because ‘is killing’ necessary excluds the past, but ‘kills’ does not. Third time the cham though so I made the whole comment about it this time.

          • kibiz0r@midwest.social
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            7 months ago

            If I understand you correctly, you’re saying that:

            “No one kills more efficiently” includes all past events.

            “No one is killing more efficiently” would be the proper way to exclude past events.

            But I have a few questions about that:

            1. Does that mean that the phrase “No one has killed more efficiently” is the same as “No one kills more efficiently”?
            2. Would it be proper to say “No one is killing more efficiently” even if they are not currently killing at this exact moment, but just in recent history?
            3. If I say “No one speaks Ancient Greek”, am I incorrect? Is it fair to correct me with “Actually, the Greeks of 1000 BC speak Ancient Greek”?
            • nondescripthandle@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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              7 months ago

              Im saying that it’s ambiguous, the way I phrased it was it doesn’t necessarily exclude the past. When you add the word ancient to the example about speaking greek you’re adding additional context, no one does ancient anything because that word necessarily implies the thing isn’t done anymore. I asked for more context from op to avoid misunderstanding and you made and example of how that would work and why its important.

              Also since the greek example wasn’t a comparison like what I responded to we could make it one and see how that looks too.

              “No one speaks Ancient Greek as efficiently as the Language Majors”

              Would it be unfair to comment that maybe the Acient Greeks did?