Re: Country Names -- Local Pronunciations

----- Original Message -----
From: "John Cowan" <cowan@...>
To: <CONLANG@...>
Sent: Thursday, May 15, 2003 5:20 AM
Subject: 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.
>
"I reckon" is quite common in my dialect...I'm not sure whether it's an
Americanism, as it has distinctly different intonation, and is almost always
followed by |right| [r@i?]... 'I reckon, right, that..' [@ r\Eck@_nn_} r@i?
D&?]

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