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There is a text like this,

"The belief that the world was round was not strange to Columbus."

I think 'the world was' should be fixed like 'the world is'. Because 'the world is round' is the truth of all time. Am I wrong?

1 Answer 1

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With a timeless property like that, your version (with is) is possible; but it is not usual.

The habit in English of converting the tense of reported speech in the past ("He believed 'It is round'" => "He believed it was round") is so strong, that it tends to overcome logical objections like yours.

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  • What is the common usage of this sentence, 'was' or 'is'? And What is the proportion of the use of 'was' and 'is' in this case?
    – 박용현
    Feb 21, 2017 at 1:02
  • Probably 7 to 1 in favor of was. Feb 21, 2017 at 5:55
  • The GloWbE corps has 32 instances of "that the world is round" against 29 of "that the world was round". But only about 8 of the 32 are in the past - most of them are things like "we can demonstrate that the world is round" which are present anyway. So excluding that, we get something like 29:8 in favour of "was" - rather lower (in this case) than Clare's figure (though I have no idea where she got that from).
    – Colin Fine
    Feb 21, 2017 at 12:07

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