I had saw this cool post. Languagehat (another toothsome blog I don't get over to often enough) is pondering a development in English speech that I can't say I've ever encountered: the use of "may have" rather than "might have" for the contrary-to-fact past. It may be that I haven't been attuned to the usage. My ear, however, is sensitive to another trend described by lh's commenter "Toby" - the replacement of the past participle by the past tense. "Had wrote", "had drove", "had ran", "had went", etc., drive me to distraction. I assume that these constructions are probably the product of the natural evolution of the language, but as I am an irritable middle-aged person, becoming ever more rigid in my perceptions and prejudices, I reserve the right to snarl. I've noticed this usage more often in the Western than the Eastern U.S. - concurrently with noticing that I had begun (begun, not began, damn it) to drop my g's and pronounce "for" as "fer".

Naturally I applaud languagehat's defense of the noble form y'all:

[...]y'all is a particularly bad example to cast stones at, since English badly needs a second-person plural form, and that's a convenient and (to my mind) attractive one. I use it frequently.

Of course. I use it all the time, myself. Ever since the demise of thou and its cases, English has been walking around immodestly with no proper second person plural. (Note to ignorant Yankees: one does not use "y'all" to address an individual.) Unfortunately, though "y'all" neatly bumps "you" into the second person singular slot and takes on its former pluralizing duties, the second person in English has not yet reinstated the second person singular formal duties of the second person plural. Hence I am still bereft of a form to distance myself from overly familiar whippersnappers and telemarketers (who invariably mispronounce my first name). By the way, to certain foreign bloggers - and some northeasterners, for that matter - who persist in believing that the use of "y'all" is a veritable scarlet syllable signifying, inter alia, ignorance, racism, theocratic sympathies, and in general, illiberal tendencies of satanic proportions, I say: screw you and your blinkered parochialism. May you spend eternity at a cocktail party in hell sweating the imaginary nuances - for a native speaker of American English, anyway - of person and purpose for "shall" and "will".

While I'm on the subject of existing usage, allow me a little aside on non-existing usage. I know that children, when they are beginning to master spoken language, speak, quite rationally, according to the logic of grammar, not "correctly". I was charmed at my daughter's constant use, when she began to speak, of the construction "amn't I?". And I had to wonder why English speakers do not say "amn't I". People tend, if they go near that interrogative construction at all, to say "aren't I", which makes no sense at all. "I are"? Feh. (Does "ain't" fit in here somewhere?) Could some linguistically-informed person enlighten me on the reasons for the absence of the logical and easily pronounce-able form "amn't I" from standard speech? I'm correct in my grammatical logic, amn't I?

Posted by Moira Breen at January 03, 2004 06:04 AM