Re: What is this construction

Hi all,
Ray Brown wrote, on Wednesday:
> Fergal McCullough wrote:
> [snip]
> > I'd like to point that I'm quite familiar with this sort of usage,
> > though I'm unlikely to produce it. It sounds quaint and old-fashioned
> > and english, all of which are synonyms. (I'm Australian, fwiw.)
> >
> > --
> > Tristan.
> >
> > The strange thing for me is that as an Irish person who has lived in the
> > North of England for 15 years this is a perfectly normal construction for me
> > but I can't for the life of me remember whether I would have considered it
> > normal before moved here
> >
> > Fergal
>
> Oh dear, this turning - I guess inevitably - into YAEDT. For those who
> said it ain't grammatical, it may well not be in your prescriptive
> version of English, but it certainly occurs, including the Tolkien example.
>
> Personally, I see nothing ungrammatical with either from a prescriptive
> or descriptive point of view. Like Tristan, I (a southern Britisher) am
> quite familiar with this sort of usage but am unlikely to produce. It
> also sounds a little old-fashion to me, but I can well believe it is
> current in regional colloquial forms.
As another, maybe older, Australian, I can tell you that this kind
of construction was completely foreign to me until I heard it on
TV shows from Britain, almost certainly on "Coronation Street", in the
early sixties I guess.  Not that we particularly _liked_ the show, but
we were all fascinated  at the time by the strange way they spoke!
(Much as we enjoyed annoying our physics teacher, just to hear him
excitedly berate us in a broad Yorkshire accent - a complete novelty
to us in Tasmania at the time.)  This was ground-breaking TV, the
"reality TV" of its day, which gave a warts-and-all view of the life of
the British working classes - far removed from the pap designed by
the English upper classes to reinforce and purvey the prejudices of
their supposed "educated" (read "upper class" or "upper middle class")
audiences.

Now it's part of my "listening history", and I can readily understand
it without a thought, but it still registers as definitely un-Australian.

In turn, I'd like to ask you all about another kind of construction.
When was this kind of construction first used in English? -
"Because of deregulation, power generation is separate from
transmission is separate from retail distribution."

It's admirably terse, but I'm unsure how to analyse it.  Traditionally,
it would have been something like -
"Because of deregulation, power generation is separate from
transmission, which in turn is separate from retail distribution."

Regards,
Yahya

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