Re: Word usage in English dialects // was Slang, curses and vulgarities

Quoting "Thomas R. Wier" <trwier@...>:

> > > No, Tristan and Andreas are rather exaggerating the death of "shall".
> >
> > Excuse me? When have I exaggerated the death of 'shall'?
>
> Well, what you did say was that you don't use "shall", and that you
> thought it was only used in the KJV Bible, which uses an archaic
> version of modern English.  Doing a quick search with an online
> Bible using the New International Version (ca. 1970-80s?), I found
> 409 instances of "shall", in most books of the Bible, New and Old
> Testament, and including instances not used in questions or in the
> first person.  E.g. Revelation 1:7 reads: "So shall it be! Amen".
This must be some sort of misunderstanding. The only thing I've said about my
own use of 'shall' is that I do *not* use it quite so sparingly as I was taught
to in school (we were taught only to use it in questions of the "Shall I ... ?"
type and in Biblical quotes). A sufficiently thorough search of the CONLANG
archives would, little doubt, unearth instances of me using the word in
non-quotation indicative sentences, altho I shan't pretend I use it often.

I believe it was Tristan who said he thought that KJV was the only Bible
translation to use it. I do not know enough of English Bible translations to
dare any claim as to with which frequency they use any given grammatical
construction or word.

                                                          Andreas