LL-L "Grammar" 2012.11.01 (04) [EN]

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 L O W L A N D S - L - 01 November 2012 - Volume 04
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From: Mike Morgan mwmbombay at gmail.com

Subject: LL-L "Grammar" 2012.11.01 (02) [EN]

Ingmar,

Yes, I am sure the "no double modals" rule is an artificial one (like
the "no double negatives" rule), concocted by English Grammarians way
back when, and that double modals are not all that strange in the rest
of the Germanic world (nor maybe in the linguistic world as a
whole)...  In North America anyway, such double modal constructions
"are uniquely Southern" .. meaning South Eastern (Legacies of Colonial
English: Studies in Transported Dialects,  edited by Raymond Hickey, p
285.. though of course having grown up all over the US I didn't
actually need to cite a source now, did I ;-)

As for here in South Asia, "Indian" English (which is almost dead in
Nepal, and shrinking in urban India as well, due to Global influences
... and employment at call centers) I can't off the top of my head
recall how common double modals might be ... and most of my Indian
English linguistics books (which might have some corpus based stats on
the matter) have yet to be transported from Delhi up here to the
hills. I also don't know how common double modals are among BRITISH
dialects of English south of the Scottish border, but I have a general
theory, based on the fact that so many of what I have seen described
as peculiar "Indianisms" in fact have parallels in the American
Appalachian English I grew up hearing each summer ... and also out of
the mouths of my parents each day. The SE was settled early on by
large numbers of Protestant Scots and Irish -- presumably many if not
most of whom were Scots speakers. So my theory is that Indian English
is kindred, due to the "fact' that the British Raaj occupiers were
also largely made up of Scots... but then maybe that is just an image
I have from the movie "Gunga Din" of Scotsmen marching to bagpipes
against the 1867 "mutineers". ;-)

BTW, discovered this humourous (but a bit gingoistic) webpage on
Indian English... with some nice photos to accompany the funny
examples:
http://mountainsintothesea.blogspot.com/2012/06/indianisms.html

mwm || *U*C> || mike || माईक || мика || マイク (aka Dr Michael W Morgan)
sign language linguist / linguistic typologist
academic adviser, Nepal Sign Language Training and Research
NDFN, Kathmandu, Nepal

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