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Alexandre Oliva (lxo@gnusocial.net)'s status on Thursday, 17-Nov-2022 06:06:49 JST Alexandre Oliva something I've occasionally noticed from German speakers is using a continuous tense in English, where native English speakers would use plain present tense. I can't quite reconstruct an example of this, but ISTM to fit the concept. I've often wondered what language feature from German brings that over to English, but I don't speak any German to tell. does anyone who does recognize the pattern I describe and could explain it? -
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Hisham (hisham_hm@mastodon.social)'s status on Thursday, 17-Nov-2022 06:06:56 JST Hisham I love spotting what I've decided to call "grammatical accent": little ways non-native speakers bring grammar and punctuation rules from their languages. For example:
Germans adding spurious commas connecting sentence fragments: "I think I can tell, where that person is from"
French adding spaces in exclamation points: "That is a very French thing to do !"
I wonder which rules from Portuguese I unknowingly apply to my English!
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