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 Sat May 17, 2008 0:46 am Do you ever use the form 'shan't'? If yes, when? |
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Interesting links.
The second item says "Distinctive vocabulary includes borrowings and loan translations from local languages".
Could you give some examples of loan translations from your own original language, Molly?
MrP |
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MrPedantic
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| Sat May 17, 2008 2:00 am Do you ever use the form 'shan't'? If yes, when? |
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| Molly wrote: | | There are 30 per mill. examples of shan't (search sha n't) in the Time corpus and 93 per mill. in the BYU Corpus of American English. I guess some Yanks must be using it. |
As I said, "Molly", we Yanks occasionally use shan't humorously when we try to do a mock British accent. But try as we might, I'm sure the vast majority of our imitations of British English would not fool the vast majority of Brits for a second. 
Just out of curiosity, why in the world should people search for shan't with a space in the middle? That doesn't seem quite kosher to me. I suppose the space in the middle of the word was supposed to replace a second (but invisible) apostrophe. Odd. Did you even attempt to find shan't in Time or the BYU Corpus without the space?
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Yankee
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| Sat May 17, 2008 2:02 am Do you ever use the form 'shan't'? If yes, when? |
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| MrPedantic wrote: | | Could you give some examples of loan translations from your own original language, Molly? |
Yes, I think that would be quite interesting and enlightening.
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Yankee
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| Sat May 17, 2008 10:44 am Do you ever use the form 'shan't'? If yes, when? |
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[quote="Yankee"] | MrPedantic wrote: | | Could you give some examples of loan translations from your own original language, Molly? |
My "own original language" is Batu, which you already know after quizzing me a thousand times on other fora over such, and we haven't, as far as I know, loaned anything to anyone, sorry to say. Mind, there's only a few thousand of us, so...
BTW, what's the difference between "your own original langauge" and "your original language", for you? |
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Molly
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| Sat May 17, 2008 10:49 am Do you ever use the form 'shan't'? If yes, when? |
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| Quote: | | Just out of curiosity, why in the world should people search for shan't with a space in the middle? |
Does this show that you haven't even taken the slightest interest in investigating the corpora I've mentioned?
If you try searching for shan't, or other contractions, you get this message:
"In nearly all cases, the tagger separates words that have an apostrophe (e.g. we're or don't). These need to be entered as two separate words, e.g.:
we 're (notice the space)
should n't"
Happy now? |
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Molly
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| Sat May 17, 2008 12:10 pm Do you ever use the form 'shan't'? If yes, when? |
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| Molly wrote: | | Quote: | | Just out of curiosity, why in the world should people search for shan't with a space in the middle? |
Does this show that you haven't even taken the slightest interest in investigating the corpora I've mentioned? |
Oh, the arrogance! |
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Jamie (K)
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| Sat May 17, 2008 12:31 pm Do you ever use the form 'shan't'? If yes, when? |
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| Molly wrote: | | Does this show that you haven't even taken the slightest interest in investigating the corpora I've mentioned? |
No, they can provide some useful information when used appropriately. Unfortunately, however, I frequently find myself in the position of having to undo the damage and confusion that corpora misusers typically bring to ESL forums.
Interestingly, a search of the BNC brings no results for either shan't or sha n't. Should we interpret that to mean that neither of those is in use in Britain?
BNC search results for shan't
BNC search results for sha n't
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Yankee
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| Sat May 17, 2008 13:27 pm Do you ever use the form 'shan't'? If yes, when? |
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| Molly wrote: | My "own original language" is Batu, which you already know after quizzing me a thousand times on other fora over such, and we haven't, as far as I know, loaned anything to anyone, sorry to say. Mind, there's only a few thousand of us, so...
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I think the implication of the article is that a speaker's variety of Nigerian English might include directly translated phrases or structures from the local language.
There seems to be a distinctive use of future auxiliaries in Nigerian English, for instance. I wondered whether this had its origin in local language usage.
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MrPedantic
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| Sat May 17, 2008 15:35 pm Do you ever use the form 'shan't'? If yes, when? |
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| Quote: | | Oh, the arrogance! |
Doesn't it see a bit out of place that someone who spends a lot of time putting the BYU BNC and the BYU American Corpus down, doesn't know how to use it, doesn't know its functions and features? I'd say the arrogance lies with Amy.
| Quote: | | I frequently find myself in the position of having to undo the damage and confusion that corpora misusers typically bring to ESL forums. |
Well aren't you a saint? And who undoes your damage? I sympathise though.You can't imagine the cleaning up most of our teachers have to do when prescritivist teachers have been let loose on students. |
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Molly
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| Sat May 17, 2008 15:40 pm Do you ever use the form 'shan't'? If yes, when? |
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| Quote: | | Interestingly, a search of the BNC brings no results for either shan't or sha n't. Should we interpret that to mean that neither of those is in use in Britain? |
Try again: SHA N'T - 495 per million words
http://corpus.byu.edu/bnc/x.asp
If you want to get any joy from this one, http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/, you'll have to subscribe. The one above is free.
I also think you need a few lessons in how to search a corpus, esp on tokenisation. Here's a good start:
http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/docs/fused.htm
You do realise that shan't, aren't, won't, can't, don't etc. are made up of two words , don't you? |
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Molly
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| Sat May 17, 2008 15:56 pm Do you ever use the form 'shan't'? If yes, when? |
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| Quote: | | There seems to be a distinctive use of future auxiliaries in Nigerian English, for instance. I wondered whether this had its origin in local language usage. |
Would you like to create a thread about that? It's free. |
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Molly
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| Sun May 18, 2008 0:21 am Do you ever use the form 'shan't'? If yes, when? |
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| Molly wrote: | | You do realise that shan't, aren't, won't, can't, don't etc. are made up of two words , don't you? |
Really? Wow! I'd've NEVER guessed that! 
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Yankee
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| Sun May 18, 2008 0:43 am Do you ever use the form 'shan't'? If yes, when? |
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| Yankee wrote: | | Molly wrote: | | You do realise that shan't, aren't, won't, can't, don't etc. are made up of two words , don't you? |
Really? Wow! I'd've NEVER guessed that!
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Your knowing it didn't lead you to understand my sha n't search, now did it? |
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Molly
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| Sun May 18, 2008 13:28 pm Do you ever use the form 'shan't'? If yes, when? |
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Have you actually looked at and analyzed the handful of search results for shan't in the BYU Corpus of American English?
If you had an ESL student who was preparing to live and work in the US, what would your advice to him/her be with respect to using the word shan't? From what you've written, it seems you'd either simply say "Some Americans use the word shan't." or you would simply start spewing various search numbers rather than mentioning context or register. Would you even bother to mention, for example, that some of the search results in American media are excerpts of things written by people whose mother tongue is not English and who have never lived in the US?
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Yankee
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| What can you tell me about these 2? | combining two clauses |
