Hi Stephanie, Ritva:

I'm sorry, but I really don't know where all these "should confirms" are coming from! It sounds the sort of thing that the French might well do, but I have to admit that I've never come across it before.

In fact, the more I look at it, the less and less sense the sentence in question is making. "La présence de ces noms confirmèrent la tradition ... " I didn't look at it closely enough the first time. No wonder the original poster was puzzled. What on earth is "confirmèrent" doing there? It's the perfect of "confirmer", and it should be following a plural subject, not the singular "La présence". French grammatical rules are much stricter than English ones; they wouldn't mix singular and plural subjects in the same way that we sometimes do. I would have expected a singular "confirma" to follow "la présence". Why isn't it there? Has there been some mistake in the transcription somewhere? (That "eû été", for instance, should be "eût été", surely ... )




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