Learn English – I remembered ‘seeing’ or ‘having seen’ him.

gerundsgrammargrammaticalityperfect-aspectpresent-tense

I was wondering how to express the sentence correctly:

I remembered seeing him before.
or
I remembered having seen him before.

And what if remember wouldn’t be in past tense but in present tense?
I remember seeing him before.
or
I remember having seen him before.

Thanks in advance 🙂

Best Answer

The question goes much deeper than it may seem at first…

It is as simple as this…

Simply put, there was a time – before Fordism, let us say – when the most important thing in life was not to hunt down redundancy!

But nowadays

I remember having seen him.

can – and will – be simplified to

I remember seeing him.

and it makes some sense, because if I say or write 'I remember', then, of course, the thing I remember must have happened earlier... so why – Fordist minds reason – say or write 'having seen', 2 words ("What an effort! Ouch!") when just 1, 'seeing', would do, since the job of making the reader or listener realise that the action of 'seeing' or 'having seen' came before the action of 'remembering' is already done by the meaning of the verb 'remember' itself.

Let us then 'sack' the Gerund Perfect and keep the cheaper – only 1 word to write or say instead of 2 – Gerund Simple… the shareholders will be grateful for it!

Let us remember, too, that in English 'to be made redundant' is a euphemistic way of saying 'to be laid off', 'dismissed', 'sacked', 'fired'!

The tense the verb 'remember' is in does not have any importance, by the way.

Similarly,

'He went out after he had put on his coat', or 'He went out after having put on his coat'

can – and will – be simplified to

'He went out after he put on his coat', or 'He went out after putting on his coat'

since the conjunction 'after' already does the job of indicating to the reader/listener that the action of 'putting on the coat' happened earlier than the action of 'going out'. The Past Perfect or Gerund Perfect, 2 words each, can be replaced with a 'cheaper' Past Simple or Gerund Simple, 1 word each.

The French, instead, say or write

'Il sortit après qu'il eut mis son manteau' or 'Il sortit après avoir mis son manteau'

and it would not come to their minds – and it would be grammatically incorrect* – to say or write

'Il sortit après qu'il mit son manteau'* or 'Il sortit après mettre son manteau'*.

Very 'square' and 'tame', I must admit, like a garden 'à la française', compared to the wilder – because it obeys the Law of the Jungle? – English garden… Is it because the French put up with a certain amount of redundancy that they have come to… what they have come to?

Languages reflect states of mind! Language IS political, whether we like it or not!

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