Re: Are "semi-creoles" widespread?

On Aug 25, 10:58 pm, "Richard Wordingham" <jrw0...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
"LEE Sau Dan" <dan...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Darkstar> Personal endings in verbs (as in Romance languages) are
Darkstar> probably not hard to learn (for some reason). Full
Darkstar> isolation in verbs is rather rare (Mandarin, English,
Darkstar> just remind me where else?)

Full? English?
But English DOES inflect the verb for person. The "-s" in 3rd
pers. sg. present. The inflections of "to be" and "to have".

The 3rd person '-s' is missing in much British English speech, and I am
talking about speech that is close to Standard English, not obscure country
dialects. The 'was'/ 'were' distinction is also naturally missing in much
British English. However, that leaves the present of the verb to be, and
the tenses where it is the auxiliary, and, so far as I am aware, the
dialects I am thinking of always preserve the 3-way person/number contrast.
I have no acquaintance with real dialects using uninflected 'be' throughout
the present tense, as in 'Mummerset', the stage parody
of a country dialect.

I think English keeps progressing towards isolation over centuries:
from the Shakespearian "dost" and "sayeth", to the transformation of
be-a-verb-ing-construction into the Progressive Tense, and then to the
partial loss of "shall", "whom", and the little that was left from the
Subjuntive Mood (as in "If I was you"). Now we seem to witness the
loss of "to" in infinitives as in "help do something" and the
formation of "wanna", "gonna", "gotta" as new standard verbs and their
gradual infiltration into the written speech, and finally the
progressive loss of the Perfect Tense "have" as in "I been there" or
"You got it", or the juxtaposition of "have" with the modal verbs (as
in "should've, could've" which tend to work as single units).
Therefore, it's reasonable to suggest that the dialectical loss of -s
and other similar phenomena are just part of the same process.

.

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