how are they teaching english learners about "how come" i wonder. like oh yeah so it goes [interrogative word] [auxiliary conjugated* to match the subject] [subject] [bare infinitive of main verb**] [rest of sentence] UNLESS you use "how come" in which case you just stick it before a normal sentence bam dusted. which is nuts like what is the "come" doing there. does this confuse people or am i overthinking it.
*assuming it's one of the auxiliaries that has conjugated forms
**unless the auxiliary is a form of "be"
anyway i looked up the etymology and you can see how we got there from a sentence like "How come you remember xyz?" which is just "How come you to remember xyz?" with the "to" dropped. and that's a pretty normal sentence for old-timey english when subject-verb inversion was a standard way to form questions and not just used with auxiliaries/the copula. (or idk, would "come to" be considered an auxiliary construction here?)
but at some point maybe we stopped analyzing the "remember" there as an infinitive and instead thought of it as a verb conjugated in the present tense with the subject "you", because after all it is right after the subject, which is usually where a conjugated verb goes. and in modern english in the majority of cases (excepting the third person singular and the verb "be"), the bare infinitive of a verb and its conjugated present tense form are identical. so we could continue to say "How come you remember xyz?" in the modern day and it sounds totally normal because we're interpreting it as [how come] [you remember], just treating "come" as part of the fossilized phrase "how come" and not as a verb at all. (whereas "How came you to remember xyz?" sounds very old-timey now because we would consider "remember", not "come", the verb to be conjugated ("How come you remembered xyz?").)
i can't think of any other interrogatives that work this way, where you just insert them before a normal sentence you haven't changed at all. maybe the closest would be "what say", but that's standing in for "what do you say to this idea?" and then of course to state the idea you would use a normal sentence in the indicative. i suppose "how about" functions the same and means the same as "what say", but it seems less wild to me because it doesn't have a verb in it.
i want to make more of these but all my ideas suck. something like..."where get". it would be short for "where do you get off thinking that [regular sentence]?" like "source? (derogatory)" but the use cases are vanishingly small because usually when people ask that they're referring to a sentence that has been said immediately prior and therefore don't need to say the sentence and can use a pronoun (like "that") or can just say "source?" lol. but that's my best idea. what say we try to come up with some other ones?
