Re: "Could of" (Was: Be and Have in Arabic, English and German)

Ekkehard Dengler wrote: 
Lukas Pietsch schrieb:

Ekkehard Dengler wrote:

Lukas Pietsch schrieb: 


My only take on the issue has so far been that "would of" is just an
orthographic effect, because [@v] is the only common weak form of "have"
that otherwise hasn't got a conventionalised orthographic
representation, such as "'s", "'ve", "'d", "'m", and so on.


How do you mean? What about "should've"?


Well, arguably, "'ve" is not an ideal orthographical representation of
[@v], because it doesn't cater for the initial vowel.



But wouldn't you agree that it's conventionalised?


Yes, sure, but the primary function of <'ve> seems to be to serve in environments where the preceding word ends in a vowel, and the auxiliary is really just [v]: "I've", "we've", "you've", "they've". The phonological shape in the case of the modal-verb sequences is different, so the use of <'ve> here might be felt to be a less good fit.

Lukas
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