"Double contractions" have two apostrophes where letters have been deleted. Wiktionary has a page of
over 40 examples, including..
'tisn't
couldn't've
it'd've
mustn't've
they'd've
...and so on, most of them predictably contractions of common verbs. Here are the ones I found most interesting -
sha'n't, which came into use after the more commonly seen shan't,
y'all're, which I heard for years when I lived in Texas,
'n' (as in rock 'n' roll or fish 'n' chips), which I'll bet is most commonly printed with just one apostrophe, but obviously should have two.
- and the three nouns on the list:
bo's'n
fo'c'sle, and
ha'p'orth
The new word for the day is "
clitic," defined as "a morpheme that functions like a word, but appears not as an independent word but rather is always attached to a following or preceding word. In English, the possessive
-'s is an example."
I have, probably more often than not, seen 'n', for and, printed with 2 apostrophes.
ReplyDeleteMusn't've, I feel, really should have 3.
Ayoshe, you're sort of right re the last point, only because I misspelled mustn't've in the post (I forgot the "t"). Fixed. Thanx.
ReplyDeleteI was just trying to figure out clitics the other day. They're kind of a nebulous entity- somewhere between a proper affix and a free word/lexeme.
ReplyDeleteI don't really understand contractions, either- why we use both "I'm" and "I am", for instance. I suspect that the uncontracted forms are linguistic dinosaurs; if we didn't have standardized, prescriptive writing to maintain them, they would soon naturally fall out of use.
It's only a quirk of convention that keeps us writing apostrophes to convey the "real" words that make up the contractions. Linguistically I'm pretty sure the contractions are valid lexemes in and of themselves. We could just as easily write:
ime
were
youre
yallre
hes/shes/its
theyre
These words could be described, basically, as inflected irregular forms of 'to be'.
In general we can see "have" and "not" (among other words) turning from a word into a clitic into a affix. English is becoming downright agglutinative!