Mind Your Language | 1 March 2003

The sharp-eared Mr Keith Norman writes from Oxford with an observation that at first made me think our command of hypothetical constructions was breaking down. For Mr Norman notices people saying things like, ‘If I’d have known that…’. At first he wondered if I’d here stood for ‘I would/should’ or ‘I had’. Then he heard someone say, ‘Had I have known that.’

Mr Norman thought people might be using in the protasis the formula that should apply only to the apodosis. But it is a question not of repeating the auxiliary would but of inserting a redundant have. I pondered it for some time before thinking to look it up in R.W. Burchfield’s New Fowler’s.

There, under ‘had’ he discusses the phenomenon, and even refers us to the mangrove swamp of section 26 of the Oxford English Dictionary’s entry for have. The redundant have is found in the 15th and 16th centuries, and has returned in the past century in American usage: ‘If the fire had not have gone out.’ In speech one of the auxiliaries is often contracted: ‘If I’d have known’ or ‘If I had’ve known’.

The construction conveys both tense and ‘unreality’ when expressing ‘unreal conditions in the past’. I can see some sense in this, and, if it is not English grammar, at least it is not mere brute error. In New Zealand and America there is, researchers find, wide acceptance of constructions on the pattern of ‘If I’d have been there…’. In Britain, Mr Norman and others have their doubts.

Perhaps Mr Norman can help Gerald W. Hunt, who writes from New Zealand via email. A lexicographer called William Perry is frustrating him. Perry was the compiler of a Synonymous, Etymological and Pronouncing Dictionary (1801).