I'm a good writer, ain't I?

It's considered good grammar to say, "I'm a good writer, aren't I?" But how would you say that without the contraction? You wouldn't say, "I'm a good writer, are I not?", any more than you'd say, "Are I a good writer?" You'd say, "I'm a good writer, am I not?". But what is the contraction for "am not"? It isn't "aren't"; it's "ain't," which used to be a perfectly good word until it got booted from the King's English.

Therefore, instead of saying, "I'm a good writer, aren't I?", which is not, strictly speaking, correct; one should say, "I'm a good writer, ain't I?" Let us reinstate the word "ain't" into its proper place in the English language, as the appropriate contraction for "am not."

So, the next time your child says defiantly, "I ain't going to school today," tell him that he doesn't need to, because his grammar is perfect!

- Bill

Post 1

Saturday, May 19, 2007 - 2:16pm

Bill, ain't has a long and prestigious pedigree through Shakespeare back to Middle English. The word may have evolved from a phonetic form /ant/ with a long /a/ (Rhymes with "ah" as in, "The doctor doctor told me to say ah.") It may have been a contraction from /amnt/ where the deleted m lengthened the vowel. Long /a/ in Middle English developed into the long a of modern English which rhymes with the vowel in grey and wait. Lexicographers, hearing ain't couldn't correlate the form "am not" with an em-less "contraction" with a mutated vowel. They did not have the analysis of historical and comparative linguistics which today tells us that the development amnt>ahnt>eynt spelled "ain't" is entirely regular and to be expected. They arbitrarily rejected ain't which had been a perfectly acceptable spoken form for centuries and reinterpreted it as coming from aren't.

This type of well-intentioned but illogical "correction" of English that occurred around the time of the standardization of English at the time of Shakespeare and the Authorized (King James) Bible is exemplified in all sorts of forms such as debt and indict with their silent letters. Middle English (Chaucerian) had dette and indite, which followed actual pronunciation. Latin educated pedants reintroduced the silent letters due to their Latin pedigrees. Of course, am is not a Latin form. The authorities had no prestigious standard such as Latin from which to correct ain't, so they used their imaginations instead.

Ted Keer

(Edited by Ted Keer
on 5/19, 9:38pm)

Post 2

Saturday, May 19, 2007 - 3:24pm

Ted,

So your saying that if we accepted the "m" as silent in "amn't," we could use that spelling instead of "ain't," and people would recognize it as a contraction of "am not"? Interesting.

- Bill

Post 3

Saturday, May 19, 2007 - 9:53pm

Bill, if my analysis is correct, the m would already have dropped out, lengthening the vowel. Otherwise we'd have been saying "I an't" to rhyme with "I can't." I wouldn't advocate putting the m back, since people would probably start saying something like "I amment" based on the spelling. The ain't spelling is fine, since it does correspond to the actual sound, rhyming with paint and saint. I am used to saying "I'm not" and "aren't I." Just as we learn that the plural of ox is oxen, (a regular Old English plural still quite common today in German) there is little problem learning the specific exception. I also don't actually advocate teaching children "ain't" or advocate not "correcting" them, since learning to speak in the socially prestigious way is economically advantageous. But in relaxed conversation or when speaking with strangers there is no call for objecting to the usage of others so long as the meaning is clear.

Ted

Post 4

Saturday, May 26, 2007 - 1:43pm

The only problem with continuing to use "aren't" is that it's used inconsistently in the case of the first person singular. If you can say, "Aren't I good?" or "Are I not good," then you should be able to say, "I aren't good," or "I are not good," which, of course, you can't. I'm not demanding that children be taught grammar that is unacceptable to the educational establishment, but I think that educators themselves should consider changing the rules. If we can demand an end to so-called "sexist" language, such that writers feel obliged to use "she" instead of "he" as the indefinite pronoun (a change which is ridiculous on its face), then we can certainly move to change "aren't" to "ain't," where appropriate.

Of course, any correction would recognize the ungrammatical uses of "ain't" as well. Whereas it's grammatically correct to say, "I ain't going to school," it's incorrect to say, "He ain't going to school." "Aren't" or "are not" is clearly a plural form of the verb "to be." That it should have wormed its way into the singular is a disgrace that should be corrected. And it's high time that the educational establishment took the initiative. If they can spearhead the movement for non-sexist language, when traditional usage is already legitimate (it is understood that within the relevant context, "he" and "him" take the indefinite form; there is no intent to exclude women from personhood), they can certainly correct illegitimate uses of the verb "to be."

Perhaps, the capital letter "E" could be introduced as the gender neutral, first person singular. But then you'd have to find a substitute for "him/her." Right now, the plural pronouns "they" and "them" have been adopted in violation of good grammar as gender neutral singular pronouns, when they are clearly plural pronouns. Rebellion against so-called "sexist" language trumps all, even good English.

- Bill

Post 5

Sunday, May 27, 2007 - 6:09pm

The use of they as singular animate indefinite is attested in Shakespeare. The "th" third-person plurals forms were actually borrowed into English from Norse when Knut ruled the Danelaw.

All grammatical paradigms are subject to two forces - analogy which tends to cause regularity, and regular sound change which leads to certain sounds coming to differ according to their contexts.

Note that the so-called "s" plural ending can sound like an /s/ or a /z/ or as /-iz/ when found in cats, dogs and fishes. Tis plural ending was one of the several regular plural endings of Old English, where it was always pronounced /-@s/ as in OE "stan" stone (s.) "stanas" stones (pl.) and the @ is a scwha. Other plurals include -er, -en, -0 and vowel change such as in child/ren ox/en deer/deer and mouse/mice. Note that children is actually a double plural (both -er and -en) and that other pluarls like kine and cannon usally tend to be analogized to cows and cannons.

At any one point in time, every language and dialect has some irregularities that are coming into existence and others that are passing away.

Very common forms such as pronouns and helping verbs tend toward high levels of irregularity. Consider I/me/my/mine he/him/his/his she/her/her/hers we/us/our/ours. Consider "I have two deer" and "I hafta, dear." The last consonant in "have" in the form "have to" meaning must is turning from a /v/ to an /f/ under the influence of the following /t/.

The rules which govern such innovative changes occur in all spoken languages, but which rules and which circumstances apply vary as one might imagine. English, Icelandic and Gothic are later forms or common Germanic. Sardinian, Catalan and Gascon are later forms of Latin, Latin, Germanic, Slavic and Sanskrit are later forms of Indo-European. Indo-European, Japanese and Eskimo are later forms of Eurasiatic.

There is a very highly rigorous science of comparative and historical linguistics which was developed larely during the 19th century, mostly among German philologists. Grimm's Law (as in the Brothers Grimm) shows that f/th/h in Germanic normally corresponds to p/t/c[k] in Latin, Greek, etc. Father/three/hound = pater/tres/canis = pater/tria/kuon.

Anthony Burgess' A Mouthful of Air introduces these ideas in a rigorous and layman friendly way. I recommend it for those who wish to understand language as form in the same way that I would recommend ItOE for those who wish to understand concepts as substance.

Ted Keer

Post 6

Monday, May 28, 2007 - 4:25pm

The purpose of grammar is to improve communication by making misunderstanding less likely. This purpose is facilitated by using different pronouns to refer to singular and plural subjects. To the extent that grammatical changes interfere with that purpose, they are undesirable.

- Bill

Post 7

Tuesday, May 29, 2007 - 12:27pm

It's well and good to be of that opinion, but the large mass of people will and always has spoken as if it were illiterate unless great effort is made at "correcting" them. Not only did Indo European (from which Old English and so on descended) have separate endings for every person in the vowel, it also had different cases and different pronouns. As with Latin, a single verb was an entire sentence.

As endings drop off as unstressed syllables become weakened and lost, new means of making vital distinctions arise. Old English distinguished between singular thou and plural you. The thou form has been lost in most dialects, but we can disambiguate by saying just you versus all of you or youse or y'all.

No living human language has ever succeeded in stopping the process of sound change and lexical innovation. The modern Arabic dialects are really separate languages, as are the Chinese dialects, with some differing as much as French does from Italian. Classical Arabic and Classical Sanskrit and Latin are retained for religious purposes, but Maltese, Hindi, and Romanian are all the direct and uninterrupted descendents of these classical tongues, passed on from mother to child. Because we speak with the mouth but hear with the ear transmission is never perfect. Consonant and vowel sounds, as long as they fall within a range, will be interpreted as being the same. As the range as a whole shifts over time, what sounded like /moose/ and /meese/ in Old English has come to be mouse and mice in Modern English.

There is an entire branch of the humanities devoted to just these sort of phenomena - linguistics - with comparative and historical linguistics dealing with these notions. Much of what lay people think about grammar and etymology can be as confused as layman's thinking about physics and archeology. Not all linguists are on the ball, much of modern linguistics amounts to advocating not teaching any standards because historically all standards have changed. Rather than teach subject verb-agreement, some pedagogs want to accept Ebonics as a standard. Of course, the utter absurdity of accepting a substandard as a taught standard, soon to be an abandoned standard as the next generation comes in is absurd.

I'd advocate teaching what are considered the prestigious standards of the spoken language, teaching the distinction between, say, who and whom, but also teaching logic and foreign languages. With a broader grounding in clear thought and foreign tongues one becomes much more conscious of what ones own mother tongue means.

Ted Keer

Post 8

Monday, July 2, 2007 - 10:44pm