apostrophe question
- Thread starter Tom
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KLin
Lifer
- Feb 29, 2000
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WIKI
Ain't arose toward the end of an eighteenth century period that marked the development of most of the English contracted verb forms such as can't, don't, and won't. The form first appears in print in 1778. It was preceded by an't, which had been common for about a century previously. An't appears first in print in the work of Restoration playwrights: it is seen first in 1695, when William Congreve wrote I can hear you farther off, I an't deaf[2], suggesting that the form was in the beginning a contraction of "am not". But as early as 1696 Sir John Vanbrugh uses the form for "are not": These shoes an't ugly, but they don't fit me.[3] At least in some dialects, an't is likely to have been pronounced like ain't, and thus the appearance of ain't is more a clarified spelling than a new verb form. In some dialects of British English, are rhymed with air, and a 1791 American spelling reformer proposed spelling "are" as er. Ain't in these earliest uses seems to have served as a contraction for both am not and are not.
Ain't arose toward the end of an eighteenth century period that marked the development of most of the English contracted verb forms such as can't, don't, and won't. The form first appears in print in 1778. It was preceded by an't, which had been common for about a century previously. An't appears first in print in the work of Restoration playwrights: it is seen first in 1695, when William Congreve wrote I can hear you farther off, I an't deaf[2], suggesting that the form was in the beginning a contraction of "am not". But as early as 1696 Sir John Vanbrugh uses the form for "are not": These shoes an't ugly, but they don't fit me.[3] At least in some dialects, an't is likely to have been pronounced like ain't, and thus the appearance of ain't is more a clarified spelling than a new verb form. In some dialects of British English, are rhymed with air, and a 1791 American spelling reformer proposed spelling "are" as er. Ain't in these earliest uses seems to have served as a contraction for both am not and are not.
yea, but isn't that pretty fancy thinkin' for the inventors ? Or was ain't not nonstandard back then ? I figured it was invented by non-grammarians.
SonnyDaze
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James Bond
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