Re: was did

benlizro@xxxxxxxxxx wrote:
On Sep 18, 11:19 pm, "Peter T. Daniels" <gramma...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Sep 18, 2:18 am, John Swindle <jcswin...@xxxxxxx> wrote:



On Wed, 17 Sep 2008 13:28:52 -0700 (PDT), "Peter T. Daniels"
<gramma...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Sep 17, 2:39 pm, John Swindle <jcswin...@xxxxxxx> wrote:
On Wed, 17 Sep 2008 05:32:12 -0700 (PDT), "Peter T. Daniels"
<gramma...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Sep 17, 1:17 am, John Swindle <jcswin...@xxxxxxx> wrote:
. . .
I grew up in North America and still live in the United States
(although not in North America), and I can tell you how to
construct those, or how I do it anyway. Write an e-mail
message. Use a "was" construction. Go back and change it to a
"did" construction, but forget to delete the "was." Et voila.
(Ett VOY-la.) I can't imagine that those are anything but
typos. -

Did you "grow up in NA" before 1980?

You claim to live in Hawai`i and that the construction is not
used there?

Right on both counts! So far as I know.

It's hard to say that a construction is not used, but "was did" is
certainly unfamiliar. I suspect that the examples represent
careless writing or editing and that the writers would not use it
in their own speech.

You have however heard it widely, and if others have heard it too
then I'm obviously mistaken.

Have others heard it too?

The linguists who wrote the AmSp article that analys... found
certainly have ...

(is is, not was did)

Sure. But "was did" is something else: a typo.

Of course "was did" could work just fine in a context like "Only
when he looked back and saw who it was did he abandon the idea of
singing 'The Internationale' at her wedding."-

Of course it's not a typo, or there wouldn't be so many examples so
easily findable.

I'm not sure I follow this argument. Google mines an enormous corpus,
and you can find numerous examples of all kinds of things that clearly
are errors.

Including 91,800 examples of "I have know idea".

Regards,
Ekkehard


.

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