• pyre@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    i can make arguments for both cases;

    PRO-SIMPLE FORM:

    • Perfect forms of verbs are redundant: Simple past tense doesn’t have an auxiliary verb anyway so you can already differentiate it from perfect or passive cases when you use it with have or be respectively.

    • Easier to learn one variation of each verb than two

    PRO-PERFECT FORM:

    • Redundancy in language is good, losing one part of a sentence due to noise, signal loss or damage to medium may be saved by a redundant part making communication more reliable.

    but also:

    • regular verbs already have identical simple and perfect forms

    which kind of tips the scales I think. perfect forms are already inconsistent, and verbs with identical forms already prove there’s no significant loss in not having a distinct perfect form. I was gonna add “can be used alone and carry its own meaning (eg drunk)” as a bullet point in favor of perfect forms but regular verbs with no distinct perfect form can also be used alone and still carry the meaning (eg beloved)

    so yeah I think distinct perfect forms are on their way out, long term.