Re: On prescriptions and misunderstanding: was can/may
| From: | Chris Bates <chris.maths_student@...> |
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| Date: | Wednesday, December 29, 2004, 20:48 |
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You're right of course. :) I was going to put down some merging of
different persons in some verbs, but I couldn't think of an example,
then I used one by accident. So I guess I have:
Not Using Subjunctive: If I was....
Merging of different person forms: If you was....
*hums* To tell the truth I find a lot of it quite irritating...
especially /enIfINk/. I have no problem with disagreeing with the
prescriptivist approach, but that doesn't mean that I can't feel that
someone's speech is incorrect in the English I speak.
>On Wed, Dec 29, 2004 at 05:25:36PM +0000, Chris Bates wrote:
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>>"If you was...." (ie frequent elimination of the subjunctive)
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>Minor point: saying "if I was" is elimination of the subjunctive, but
>saying "if you was" goes beyond that, since "were" is also the normal
>indicative form for the subject "you". Many dialects do have a
>universal "was" (e.g. "we was", "they was"), but I wouldn't consider
>that to be related to the subjunctive drop, which is far more
>widespread.
>
>-Marcos
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