Re: Country Names -- Local Pronunciations

Joe:
> From: "And Rosta" <a.rosta@...>
> > Joe:
> > > From: "John Cowan" <cowan@...>
> > > > Joe Fatula scripsit:
> > > > > Has it not been in use in England's English?  Over here in America,
>
> > > > > I'd use "I guess" as the more default-ish form, with "I suppose"
> > > > > as an alternative. How is it used in England?
> > > >
> > > > It used to be regularly denounced throughout the 19th and first half
>
> > > > of the 20th centuries as a hideous Americanism, despite the copious
> > > > evidence from Chaucer and Shakespeare among many others that it was
> > > > old and deep-rooted in the common tongue
> > >
> > > Old, perhaps, but still an Americanism.  I'm pretty sure it was wiped
> > > out rom English English by the 19th century
> >
> > I don't know of any research on the matter, nor of searchable corpora of
> > demotic speech from the relevant period. I do know that (a) British
> > intuitions about what is an isn't an Americanism are notoriously
> > unreliable and (b) the extent of linguistic variation within Britain has
> > always been underestimated and continues to be so
>
> Ok, lets just say: 'I guess' is not in my native vocabulary, and not in
> anyone elses(English) that I know or have heard.  ie. I have only ever
> heard 'I guess' or from Americans.  In other words, I'm pretty sure it's
> an Americanism
The evidence of the British National Corpus is that there are 935
instances of "I guess" per 100m words of British English.

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.

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.

> Oh, and I can just about imagine Standard English inserting 'I guess', but
> definitely none of the local dialects
Maybe your local dialect. Nobody has sufficiently compendious knowledge
to be able to speak for all the regional dialects on so subtle a point.

--And.

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