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Comment by jihadjihad | Hacker News Reader

> which I have swutch to

That's a past participle I've never seent before

Like the joke of the guy returning to Boston after being away for years; asks his cab driver "Do you know where I can get scrod" and the driver says "Sure, but I've never heard that in the past perfect before!"

This might be the first time I get a joke's punchline but not the setup

Scrod is the name for a small whitefish; he was looking for a seafood restaurant.

You can create infinite such jokes that end with:

…and the duck said to the bartender, “put it on my bill”

Hmmm. When I heard that joke long ago, the driver said it was the pluperfect subjunctive. And here I took his word for it.

Same thing. From Wikipedia: "The pluperfect (shortening of plusquamperfect), usually called past perfect in English"

Another especially funny part of that joke for me is that this is set in Boston (which has a couple of important colleges) ... because someone once told me that a lot of post-graduates of that college I was attending were driving taxicabs in that city.

For some reason part participles are particularly hard for me too (native English speaker who speaks no other languages fluently). (they must just be a mess in English? I can't imagine how non-native speakers ever get any of them)

I'm going to go with swutcheted

English verbs are pretty tame compared to Slavic verbs that can be modified with all kinds of perfective prefixes.

On the other hand, Chinese verbs are even easier. They don't even have a tense!

I wouldn’t say that Chinese verbs have no tense so much as that they are uninflected and that tense is marked with particles (which admittedly do not cause difficulties with irregular infexions).

Chinese technically does not have grammar tenses, but it has aspects indicated by particles. They mark the completion status, direction, presence, and so on.

However, the verbs themselves don't have tense. So these sentences can be identical: "I will walk home, then I will eat a cake" and "I walked home, then I ate a cake".

The overall timeframe can be given by a larger context: "Once my shift is over, I ..." / "I drank too much yesterday, that's all I remember: ".

It's simply not possible in English because every verb has a grammar tense built into it.

For entertainment look up Germanic string and weak verbs.

autocorrect unspelling above: string -> strong

( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanic_strong_verb )

I find this all much ado ablaut nothing.

Second guessed myself and had to look up whether this was actually a word

If it was phrased 'to which I have swutch' I don't think I'd bat an eyelid!

(i.e. past perfect, I think?)

If 'swutch' is the (past) participle of 'to switch':

Perfect: "to which I have swutch"

Pluperfect/past perfect: "to which I had swutch"

Oh yes, thanks.

Let's go crazy and do: to whuch I have swutch.

Google says the correct term is, in fact, Nintendo Switch.

I assume it lets you know where to buy one as well.

How’d you guess?

Trust Google with the facts.

maybe you haven't liveth long enough

"swutch"

Compilation error at line 173.

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