Re: CHAT: which's

Joe:
> On Tuesday 04 March 2003 5:44 am, Nik Taylor wrote:
> > Tim May wrote:
> > > Your dialect won't allow "I've not" either?
> >
> > Nope.  To me, that sounds English.  I'm sure there are probably other
> > dialects outside of England that do that, and probably dialects in
> > England that don't, but "English" is the association I have when I hear
> > a form like "I've not"
>
> Thing is, It's not English, I have never ever heard a person say 'I've not'
> 'I have not' or 'I haven't' are the only two options I've heard, outside of
> Victorian plays by Oscar Wilde or somesuch person
I find it hard to imagine how someone can live in England, even if
they've grown up in London, and think that "I've not" is not English
English. It's not even restricted to the North. Searching the
British National Corpus online:

http://sara.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/lookup.html

finds 0 "I've not" and only 3 "I haven't" (100m words, of which
10m are spoken), so that doesn't prove much, but if you google
for them you find that although "I haven't" is ten times more
common globally, "I've not" is predominantly British.

--And.

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