Re: x > f sound change

Michael Poxon wrote:
> Something I've noticed very much recently, certainly in British English; not
> just sound change, but syntactic change too. The ending /schwa+v/ found in
> "could've", "should've" etc., is being interpreted as "of" instead of a
> contraction of "have", and the emphatic response articulated as "You should
> of!" instead of "You should have" and so on. My kids (13 and 16) consider
> this perfect grammatical.
_of_ and -'ve are homophonous.  "You should of" is merely an
orthographic variant of "You should've", altho the fact that it's often
spelt that way indicates that "should've" is now seen as a single unit
rather than a contraction of "should have", much as the spelling "ya'll"
indicates that it's no longer seen as a contraction of "you all".  "You
shouldn't!" is grammatical, too, showing that the use of the contraction
isn't unusual.

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