Quote:
Originally Posted by DanaC
Nothing wrong with dialect forms. 'Standard' English is just the dialect which won out as the 'correct' version, refined through latinate grammar.
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Latinate vocabulary, yes; latinate grammar no, despite the dominies' try at making us never end sentences a preposition with, up with which we don't now put. Because structurally, you can't do that in Latin. But English isn't Latin. It even has more letters -- K, U, W, a frenchy J, and a Z. Between the Angles and the Saxons speaking distinct tongues, but still with eighty to ninety percent commonality, Old English had all its noun declensions knocked off in the collisions -- grammar teachers being thin on the ground in the Dark Ages. It already had few verb forms to keep track of, so I suppose (without certainty) that our trains of auxiliary verbs to arrive at the meaning we intend for the verb in the sentence were already being joined up.
We did keep declining pronouns, though, at least into subjective and objective cases -- though usually we just call them forms. We share this not only with the Germanic group, but indeed all of Europe. (What do the Basques do to personal pronouns? And who besides a Basque can tell?
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Juniper: except the ones that are spatulate seal parts.