Piotr said: " is not > i'n't/en't (late 17th century) "
Well now! We might be a bit backward here in t'North of England but ah never knew we was Jacobean!
I've used this "i'n't" word all of my life, and to say "ain't" for any of its varied meanings seems quite alien to me. For the have not contraction I've always used something on the lines of "'a'n't" . On reflection, got is also pretty rarely used here too, along with all those awful "Do you.." kind of sentences. It realy makes me cringe when I hear my more Southerly friends reply in this fashion to a "Have you...?" sort of question, and has always seemed very American to me.
Perhaps our trend to use a simple 'a' sound for the word 'I' has a lot to do with our keeping the have in conjunction with got.
Think of it in terms of the rhyming nature of I and have. Makes it a lot easier to slur them into one word whil still being aware of the grammaticl structure involved.
"'V'yer got a X, lass?"
"Noe, but a've got a Y, Luv."
-----Original Message-----
From : Piotr Gasiorowski <
gpiotr@...>
A good point about ?ain't?. It seems to have supplanted
>several older negatives. Here are some attested but
>?non-standard? developments:
>
>have not/has not > ha'n't (Walker 1775 wrote it rhymed with
><aunt>; in America it would rhyme with <can't>)
>
>is not > i'n't/en't (late 17th century)
>
>am not > a'n't (in non-rhotic English homophonous with
><aren't>, hence ?I'm clever, aren't I??)
>
>are not > /a:nt/ with the loss of /r/ so early that the
>negative managed to be affected by the Great Vowel Shift >
>/E:nt/ > /eint/
>
>So a whole family of phonetically similar negatives --
>/a:nt/ ~ /Ent/, /int/ ~ /ent/, /eint/ (perhaps even
><won't>) -- eventually merged into a single form spelt
><ain't>.
>
>I ain't got no money (= I ain't rich).
>There ain't gonna be no dinner.
>She's cute, ain't she?
>It just ain't right.
>
>Etc.
>
>Piotr
>
>Vae victis.
-----
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