Re: Country Names -- Local Pronunciations

And Rosta scripsit:

> The evidence of the British National Corpus is that there are 935
> instances of "I guess" per 100m words of British English.
However, some of these may represent actual guesses rather than suppositions.
I took two of the random samplings offered and found one bogus "I guess"
of this type ("Shall I guess?" and "Okay, I guess [something]") in each
sample.  But the other 49 look quite American.

It would be interesting to see how many instances of "I guess" make it into
British edited prose.  Is there a Brown-type corpus on line somewhere?

> http://sara.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/cgi-bin/saraWeb?qy=I+guess
>
> This compares with 6840 instances of "I suppose" and 973 instances of
> "I reckon". So I see no grounds not to see it as part of British English.
> You might try clicking on that url to see how foreign the sentences
> seem to you.
"I reckon" I recognize as common in Southern American English, though
not part of my dialect except as a mock-ruralism.  The fourth 19th-century
alternative, "I calculate", appears in only 12 instances, all but one of
which definitely involve real calculations, and the one is doubtful:
"Do you know I calculate, I went on to him other night and I says you've
only nine week".  A number does appear here, though it does not appear
to be calculated; still, the sentence is obviously an anacoluthon.

> A further reason for doubting it is an Americanism pure and simple
> is that at least in BrE it can be "I'm guessing" (no BNC tokens)
> -- e.g. I could have written "I'm guessing Joe says the latter", the
> progressive used to indicate that my state of guessing is liable to
> come to an end. Contrastingly, "I'm supposing" can only be used
> in the full lexical sense of the verb (i.e. not as any sort of
> discourse marker), and my intuitions are that the same goes for
> "I'm guessing" in AmE.
I concur with your intuitions.

--
If you understand,                      John Cowan
   things are just as they are;         http://www.ccil.org/~cowan
if you do not understand,               http://www.reutershealth.com
   things are just as they are.         jcowan@reutershealth.com

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