Timeline for "Could" at the beginning of a non-question sentence
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
18 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Jun 19 at 12:10 | comment | added | Fattie | @StuartF - hmm no, it's a totally normal way to speak and write? Could you, like me, be missing the "but" (note my comment just above) | |
| Jun 19 at 12:06 | comment | added | Fattie | Isn't it more like this , grammarians? "Could we have but found a buyer, the jobs would have been spared." In the OP example is the "but" being omitted? | |
| Jun 18 at 18:06 | comment | added | GentlePurpleRain | @iwarv That changes the meaning of the sentence. "If we could have found" is not the same as "If we had found". The first discusses the possibility of finding; the second discusses actually finding. | |
| Jun 18 at 10:37 | answer | added | alan2here | timeline score: 2 | |
| Jun 18 at 8:35 | answer | added | Bolpat | timeline score: 3 | |
| Jun 17 at 19:44 | history | edited | Mari-Lou A | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
typo in title fixed
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| Jun 17 at 19:32 | history | edited | avpaderno | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
improved formatting
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| Jun 17 at 17:19 | history | became hot network question | |||
| Jun 17 at 15:15 | answer | added | TimR | timeline score: 16 | |
| S Jun 17 at 12:53 | history | suggested | Rohit Gupta | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
Corrected typos and removed thanks and marked samples in italics. And made the list work
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| Jun 17 at 12:08 | review | Suggested edits | |||
| S Jun 17 at 12:53 | |||||
| Jun 17 at 11:23 | answer | added | Edwin Ashworth | timeline score: 12 | |
| Jun 17 at 11:03 | comment | added | Michael Harvey | @StuartF - Should Hilarion disappear, we will hang you, never fear! I had to sing that in our school production of Princess Ida. | |
| Jun 17 at 10:57 | history | migrated | from english.stackexchange.com (revisions) | ||
| Jun 17 at 10:51 | comment | added | TimR | Yes, that is an alternate form of conditional statement that doesn't rely on if. But starting a sentence with a modal verb in that manner is rather old-fashioned. | |
| Jun 17 at 10:09 | comment | added | Stuart F | It's certainly possible with e.g. "should we have" but I can't find any examples with "could we have". My intuition is that "could we" sounds too much like a question/request so it could be confusing. "Were we able to" is another possibility. | |
| Jun 17 at 10:05 | comment | added | iwarv | Maybe change to "Had we found a buyer who could continue operations..."? | |
| Jun 17 at 9:19 | history | asked | Tamir | CC BY-SA 4.0 |