Re: Comin' thro' the Rye

On Feb 15, 7:26 pm, "Brian M. Scott" <b.sc...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Fri, 15 Feb 2008 16:15:23 -0800 (PST), "Peter T. Daniels"
<gramma...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in
<news:cec62b8b-ecb4-4708-adca-65ae3b9bbbd5@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
in sci.lang:





On Feb 15, 3:06 pm, Adam Funk <a24...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On 2008-02-05, Peter T. Daniels wrote:
On Feb 5, 10:15 am, ekk...@xxxxxxxxx wrote:
Gin a body meet a body
Comin' thro' the rye,
Gin a body kiss a body,
Need a body cry?
I never paid attention to the verbal form in this song till now: the
verbs don't have the third-person-singular final -s. Is this a special
tense, or is it part of Scots?
"Gin" means 'if'', so "meet" and "kiss" are garden-variety
subjunctives
English doesn't have distinct subjunctive forms --- are you thinking
of Latin?  ;-)
Of course English has subjunctives -- visible only when the
uninflected form is used as 3 sg., as in this case.

I'd phrase that a little more carefully, if I were you.  <g>

"be" is an exception to everything.
.