Comments | col_ki: Don't we've

col_ki

Don't we've

Jul 02, 2009 10:16

A fairly innocuous email tickled my brain.

"Do we not have insurance?"I would usually phrase that as "Don't we have insurance?", which, with either more or fewer contractions, is: "Don't we've insurance?" and "Do not we have insurance?", both of which sound really clunky ( Read more... )

Comments 10

loic July 2 2009, 03:42:17 UTC

I would have said "do we have insurance".

splintax July 2 2009, 05:43:35 UTC

That construction has a slightly different meaning, so it doesn't sound right when used as an answer to eg. "It'll cost us $5000 to replace the stolen goods," or any other sentence which implies that we don't have insurance.

ataxi July 2 2009, 08:01:20 UTC

http://dissertations.ub.rug.nl/FILES/faculties/medicine/2001/s.zuckerman/c8.pdf

Stop not not dis-enriching my language!

saiyanprince July 2 2009, 05:21:57 UTC

Thank you for the thankyou card :)

col_ki July 2 2009, 05:29:33 UTC

You're welcome :)

saiyanprince July 3 2009, 00:07:35 UTC

Tho in bad news, we spoke to the post office, and they said because the name on the package and the name listed for that address are different, they can't confirm that we will ever see the package.

Its common for them to become impounded and never released, apparently. :(

We'll investigate further :(

splintax July 2 2009, 05:56:55 UTC

Is there actually a rule that says you can only use "we've" to summarise the have that means "in the past", as opposed to "own"?No, but the 'in the past' meaning is a grammatical one -- that is, the word 'have' doesn't really carry any semantic content on its own, it just marks the following verb with the perfect aspect. Omitting it, therefore, doesn't really mess up basic word order ( ... )

splintax July 2 2009, 06:00:46 UTC

But on second thought, like you said, "don't we have" is valid, whereas "do not we have" isn't. So maybe, like Grahame said, the reason 'don't we've' sounds so horrible is because there are two consecutive contractions. Or alternatively, because whereas normally we'd expect a subject followed by a verb, "don't we've" is a grammatical marker followed by a subject-and-verb contraction..

In any case, I now feel that I've written far too much about this and I'll stop :-)

benmurrihy July 2 2009, 14:01:16 UTC

... "we've golden soil and wealth for toil"...

On the other hand, Advance Australia Fair does also use "girt by sea" (as I understand it, "girded by sea" would be more proper).

saiyanprince July 3 2009, 23:24:25 UTC

My guess is the copy of windows is lost to the warp for good, mate.

if it shows up again in Australia let me know, but I doubt it!