Re: Tho (was: Blandness (was: Uusisuom's influences))

David Peterson:
> In a message dated 4/15/01 6:16:04 PM, fortytwo@GDN.NET writes:
>
> << Excuse me, but language is all about commonly accepted conventions.
>
> Besides, I still find it odd that you accept contractions like "I'd" but
> not contractions like "tho".  So, please tell me, what decides whether a
> contraction is acceptable or not? >>
>
> Oh, come on!  And why is theh contraction "it's" accepted in the sentence
> "It's a bear" whereas it isn't in the sentence "I don't know what it's"?  No
> good!  Contractions like "I'd" are okay because "I" is the subject and
> "would" is an aspect/mood marker.  You can ONLY contract aspect/mood verbs.
> That's why, in English, you can say "I'm gonna eat dessert", but you can't
> say "I'm gonna Paris" for "I'm going to Paris".
& Nik Taylor:
> David Peterson wrote:
> > You can ONLY contract aspect/mood verbs.
>
> I disagree.  You can also contract the suffix -ing into -in' and
> (orthographically) "though" into "tho".
>
> Besides, "to be" is neither aspect nor mood in sentences like "It's a
> bear" or "I'm a conlanger".  Also, "not" can be contracted as -n't.
It seems to me that Nik is muddying the waters by introducing grammatical
rather than orthographic contractions. Every native speaker of English,
even illiterate ones, knows that auxiliaries (including so-called
'copula BE') do and don't cliticize (i.e. 'contract') in the environments
David describes, and likewise for "going to/gonna". Likewise, whether
or not it's true that -n't is a contraction in any meaningful sense
of that term, all native speakers, including the illiterate, know the
rules governing its behaviour.

Orthography, OTOH, is much more clearly a matter of mere social
convention, and therefore riper for being messed with by conlangers.
The examples mentioned -- "tho", "thru", "IMO" -- each have different
traditions and are accepted by different subparts of the speech
community, but it seems to me to be more relevant to this list to
not complain about others' usage but rather to entertain proposals
for orthographic modifications and debate their pros and cons.

For example, I'd be interested to know what percentage of text
compression could be achieved by various (suites of) abbreviations,
such as <the> -> <th>, <to> -> <t>, <with> -> <w>, <but> -> <bt>,
<-ation> -> <-atn>, <-Cing> -> <-Cg> and so on. Abbreviations that
don't yield much compression might not be worth learning, but those
that yield a lot would be worthwhile.

--And.