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This is a type of English usage that bristles my sensibilities when I read it (my sentence parser gives high level warnings, not errors); its most well known ex
by Jun8 2y ago
This is a type of English usage that bristles my sensibilities when I read it (my sentence parser gives high level warnings, not errors); its most well known example is "Baa baa black sheep have you any wool?" The second part of this sentence may be rephrased as (among others):
* Do you have any wool?
* Have you got any wool?
Either of these I find totally fine, though I personally prefer the latter.
Anybody else shares this feeling? For further syntactic analysis of this type of archaic usage see https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctvxcrn29 https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.3366/j.ctvxcrn29
- stvltvs 2y agoPoetry will always have a looser syntax than poetry, almost by definition. Everyone has their own tastes, but it's odd to fault poetry for expressing itself poetically.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- egypturnash 2y agoTo modern ears it sounds like a word order chosen by someone whose first language is completely outside of the Romance/Germanic language families that English straddles. Usage is king though, if a few major influencers started choosing this format on a regular basis then it could probably become normalized in a few years. You'd go from bristling to reluctantly using it to not thinking about it any more.
- Jun8 2y agoThis type of usage is archaic. AFAIK the "have you any wool" formation sounds quite natural in German ("Hast du Wolle?"), though.
- trealira 2y agoArchaic English bears other similarities to other modern European languages. For example, the verb "like" used to be similar to the Spanish verb "gustar" in that the person that's pleased is the grammatical object and the thing is the subject. For example, this is Shakespeare's Two Gentleman of Verona, Scene 2, Act 4: Host. How now! are you sadder than you were before? How do you, man? the music likes you not. Julia. You mistake; the musician likes me not. In modern English, it would mean "You don't like the music" and "I don't like the musician."
- actionfromafar 2y agoThat analysis doesn't sound right to me. "the music likes me not" To my ear, it's more similar to modern day "me likes", as in "I like". Keep in mind archaic English retains more of the Scandinavian structure. "Likes" would in that case be active, i.e. the person doing the liking. If my hunch is right, it's a play on words going from that more archaic structure in what the host says to the more modern structure in how Julia says it. Playing with the ambiguity of language.
- trealira 2y ago"The music likes me not" - "The music" is the grammatical subject, so the third-person singular conjugation "likes" is used. "Me", being the object form of the first-person pronoun, is the object of the sentence. It's comparable to how in Spanish, you'd say "Me gusta la música" and not "Yo gusto la música" - the person that does the liking is the grammatical object, and the thing that the person likes is the grammatical subject. Except, in English, unlike in Spanish, it used to be in free variation which things were the grammatical subject and object. You can even see how, in Old English, the person who liked was put in the dative case[0]. Translated into modern English, the lines would be: You don't like the music. You're wrong. I don't like the musician. Another verb this happened to was "to think." The word "methinks" is a archaism/holdover from when "think" had the meaning "to seem" and so "me thinks" came from Old English "mē thyncth," which had the first-person in the dative case. [0]: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/lician#Old_English https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/lician#Old_English
- actionfromafar 2y agohttps://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/think https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/think when was it "to seem"?
- trealira 2y agoIn Old English: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/methinks#English https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/methinks#English https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%C3%BEyncan#Old_English https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%C3%BEyncan#Old_English Edit: According to Wiktionary, it seems the meaning "to seem" was the Old English verb þyncan, and there was another verb þenċan, which meant "to think." That is, it came from the combination of two different verbs that sounded similar. So, maybe it wasn't the best example.
- vundercind 2y agoOutside the Romance languages?! My French is very rusty, but that’s one of a few normal ways to construct a question. Avez-vous de la laine?
- CRConrad 2y ago> To modern ears it sounds like a word order chosen by someone whose first language is completely outside of the Romance/Germanic language families that English straddles. No, that's perfectly ordinary current word order in many languages, both Germanic and Romance ones.
- karencarits 2y ago> "Baa baa black sheep have you any wool?" The word order matches the Scandinavian languages exactly ("Bæ, bæ lille lam, har du noe ull?"), so I guess it would be what a Scandinavian child would write when first learning English
- dctoedt 2y agoFrench, too: Avez-vous de la laine?
- arduanika 2y agoHave you no sense of decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?
- CRConrad 2y agoAnd that was less than a hundred years ago.