I never know the rule for this.

Julie leant forward to straighten his tie

Julie leaned forward to straighten his tie

What's the difference? Is one past perfect and one past historic and what does that actually mean in English?

Cheer.

They're interchangeable, Petal.

There was a thread on this somewhere a while back.

They're interchangeable - doesn't seem to be about tense at all - although different verbs seem to have different degrees of interchangeability, and Fowler says there seems to be no general principle you can apply.

I tend to go with how I'd pronounce it - I'd say it more like "He lent on the table" so I'd write "leant". But others would say "leened" and so write "leaned"

As far as I know we don't have a past historic in English. We have a present historic though it's just the same as the present in form - it tends to be used in jokes e.g. "There's this man and he goes into a bar and orders a pint." But I don't think anyone would actually refer to it by that name.

Ah, okay thanks guys.

Hmm, good guide to go by how i would say it.

I wish i knew English grammar as well as the grammar of other languages, Jem, instead of flying by the seat of my pants Like in German - when you have one rule and learn the 57 exceptions to it as well

I think it depends when you went to school if you know English grammar or not. In my day we had to parse sentences and had to know the parts of speech. I was lucky in that I also seemed to find it easy and could always see the pattern. And it helped, obviously when learning other languages. Two of my kids did French for "A" level and at degree level so I think they learned grammar that way. The other two flounder.

I did languages to degree level, but i'm not sure how much it's helped me with English grammar!

I thought you had, Sam. Did you do Latin? I didn't but my older daughter did and she said that helped her with English grammar. When my twins went to school they'd started doing parts of speech again during literacy hour, which helped them understand it better than the older ones, I think.

Petal, the best straighforward grammar I've foudn is a thinnish paperback called Oxford Everyday Grammar, which is wonderfully clear about things. I refer to it all the time, not so much for "correctness" as for teaching/blogging, and to understand how it works when something's making uneasy but I'm not sure why it feels wrong.

I didn't get much grammar at school - basic parts of speech and simple parsing at junior school, but after that only via French and Latin, and they're really, really not the same. Especially when it comes to verbs.

I suppose also having taught TEFL to all levels you have to be pretty clued up on grammar too even if you don't necessarily use the terminology.

I've done Latin and a basic TEFL course. Really, i should know better!

ooh, thanks for the book suggestion, Emma.

what does that actually mean in English?

Part of the trouble is that the educational establishment keeps changing the names of the tenses every few years. I'd put it like this for the basic tenses (old style / new style):

I make - Present / Simple present
I made - Past historic / Simple past
I have made - Perfect / Present perfect
I had made - Pluperfect Past perfect

but they have their variations like the Continuous versions - 'I am making', etc.

Having learnt (or possibly learned) Latin over an eight-year period, I find it hard to drop the old names.

I agree with all the comments about leaned/leant, although I feel that, when used passively as in:

he found the spade leant against the wall

or

the spade had been leant against the wall

,
'leaned' might have an awkward ring to it, but that's most likely a personal ism rather than a grammatical requirement.

Personally I have never heard of the term "past historic" as used in the English language.

Both those examples are terribly clumsy to my ears, Chris. I would say "He found the spade leaning against the wall."

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Also, your first sentence isn't actually passive. I would use "leaning" because it isn't a finished action. It was leaning there before you saw it and when you look away it will still continue to lean.

Thanks, Chris -- yes, that's the understanding i had of the difference between the past historic and perfect.

Urgh, the more you look into something, the less simple it becomes!

Jem

Yes, thinking back, we used to say preterite rather than past historic but maybe that too was just in connection with Latin and European languages and, as you say, not with English. I concede that Simple Past states the meaning very clearly.

I also agree that 'he found' is definitely active, but was rather referring to the 'leant' as a passive past participle (= having been leant) used adjectivally.

You're right also that both phrases could be better expressed using a different construction, although there is a shade-of-meaning difference in that 'leaning' suggests the thing just happened to be there while 'leant' implies more strongly that somebody had put it there, but I was trying to find an example of where 'leaned' and 'leant' were not totally interchangeable and I felt that you could get away with 'leant' here but not 'leaned'.

It's all very much a matter of as opposed to grammar, I suppose.

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It's all very much a matter of preference as opposed to grammar, I suppose.