On Tuesday 23 Aug 2005 22:00, Anders Johansson wrote:
On Tuesday 23 August 2005 22:44, Dylan wrote:
You're gonna have to learn to live with that one I'm afraid. Because the de-stressed form of /HAVE/ is phonetcally identical to the de-stressed form of /OF/ children acquiring English as a first language will learn them as the same lexical item in certain syntactic environments. One of these is "aspectual auxilliary following modal" so it's going to become a feature of Standard English and there's absolutely nothing anyone can do about it. Innit, eh?
Never.
Only if I can force them to be consistent and say "Of you done that?"
Ah, but that's a different environment. Thing is, I could give you a long and detailed analysis of it, but i won't unless you really want it.
I know that "have" sounds the same as "of" in the contraction "would've", but that doesn't detract one iota from the fact that it makes no sense whatsoever.
Only to those of us who didn't acquire it that way.
If children learn it, they'll have to unlearn it.
Get used to it. Languages change. And they change because children acquire (that's a technical term, they DON'T learn a language and you CANNOT with any success teach them a different way to speak) the language their peers speak.
As children they also learn to spell many words that they later get corrected.
Indeed, writing (and therefore spelling) is a learnt behaviour/skill. The ability to speak (communicate verbally or gesturally) is an automatic function arising from neuro-physiologcal and cognitive complexity as an emergent capability.
It's what school is all about. I know it is a living language, but some things are too silly for words
And some things never change. Leicester still ain't called Lester, is it.
As it happens, Lester (the surname, and Lister for that matter) is the same word as Leicester. Spelling has ABSOLUTELY NOTHNG to do with the syntactic and phonetic representation or realisation of our linguistic faculty. The sooner people who have less idea about what actually goes on in the brain when we speak than a monkey has about the workings of the East Inda Company, the better. Dylan -- ''Not only does the English Language borrow words from other languages, it sometimes chases them down dark alleys, hits them over the head, and goes through their pockets.'' -- Eddie Peters