MY article “Tensed up over tenses” (MOE, Jan 7) elicited some feedback which, together with my response, I wish to share with other readers. Kengt wrote that the sentence “Kong-kong kong kong kong kong-kong” demonstrates an example of wordplay concerning parts of speech rather than tenses. I agree – but it also shows that verbs in the proper context can show tense without a change in morphological form, i.e. without an internal change in spelling (e.g. write/wrote, go/went) or without the addition of inflectional suffixes (e.g. walk/walks/walked).

Jonathan Chapman wrote: “I think it’s helpful to distinguish tense (past, present, future) from aspect (simple, continuous, perfect) If you say ‘present tense’ and ‘perfect tense’, you obscure the fact that, for example, ‘present perfect’ and ‘present continuous’ are two aspects of the same verb.” I did indeed make these distinctions. My first table showed the simple aspect of the past, the present, and the future tenses. The second table, in my original copy, also showed the continuous and the perfect aspects of the past/present/future tenses.

It is unfortunate that my original table was reset – and given the misleading caption “Continuous tenses” – when published.

Kengt asked: “What about Future simple in the past” and “What about Future perfect in the past”. For illustration, I gave an example of agreement of tenses, thus: ”she said that she would go to the concert” (see #3 under the heading Sequence of tenses). Other examples may, of course, be made up with the use of the appropriate forms of the auxiliary verbs “to be” and “to have”.

Jonathan Chapman contributed “the nearest English equivalent I know to the repetitive ‘kong’ narrative”, which has 11 repetitions of the word “had” but which makes sense only when punctuated, as follows: “She, where he had had ‘had’, had had ‘had had’; ‘had had’ had had a greater impact”.

The “saw in Warsaw” wordplay elicited three other versions. I agree with Jonathan Chapman that I had “mis-remembered the play on words.” His version, which must be the one that I mis-remembered, goes like this: “I saw a saw in Warsaw, and of all the saws I saw, I never saw a saw like the saw I saw in Warsaw.” The version from Kengt goes thus: “I once saw a saw in Warsaw, and of all the saws that I have seen, I have never seen the big saw which I saw in Warsaw.”

Then there is the new take from MOE punster, Oh Teik Theam: “I saw a big saw in Warsaw, near a village where a blind carpenter picked up a hammer and saw, and all Warsaw saw that the carpenter could now easily saw with the saw, which was the same saw that I saw in Warsaw.”

Are there readers who wish to join me on a trip to Warsaw to join together all the pieces produced by that big saw in Warsaw?

Now I’d like to add to my last article “’Tain’t rite” (MOE, Jan 21) in which I said that “some words and expressions which have appeared in print as gaffes or in some other guise ... are so subtle as to likely pass unnoticed ...” I admit to one such goof, but nobody seems to have noticed it. In Open Channel (MOE, Jan 7), I wrote: “The term for goat meat, specifically ‘the flesh of goats, used as food’, is chevon – thanks to Oh Teik Theam and Hussaini Abdul Karim.”

The phrase thanks to means “due to, owing to, because of”. The quotation, as it stands, implies that Oh Teik Theam and Hussaini Abdul Karim coined the term chevon – as if they could not have come up with a better term!

Sorry, old chaps, I actually meant to thank you – not to deride you – for your input. – Dr Lim Chin Lam

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