- Forum >
- Topic: Swedish >
- "Han brukar komma hem sent."
27 Comments
1454
I'd just like to add that this happens because in English, you don't use used to in the present tense, it's a quirk of English. So in the past tense, this could have been He used to come home late with the infinitive too.
1454
I'm not sure if there's a difference between Swedish and English here or not, maybe there is. I'm pretty sure it doesn't always imply that in English either though, think about how it could be used in a context of a story told in the past tense. And generally you probably wouldn't say Han brukade komma hem sent in Swedish either if he still brukar komma hem sent, then we'd say that instead. But maybe you're onto something.
282
Interesting, apparently Old English used to use "brucan" for this purpose as well, but when we adopted the word "use" from Latin via French, it also displaced "brucan" to give "use" a secondary meaning. That doesn't explain why there's this strange gap in the standard present tense, though... I wonder if it was some sort of parallelism with "use" that led "usually" to replace it in that tense.