The Spelling of Cannot

[Laurence Horn]

At 10:54 AM -0500 1/30/01, Bruce Dykes wrote:
>There's also the presence of various letter doublings in English spelling:
>ll,ss,tt,oo,ee, and of course, nn. Perhaps it's less a matter of phonetics
>and meanings than following already present spelling conventions?
>
>And I haven't seen many -ldn- or -lln- letter combinations...
>
>bkd

unless you count "couldn't", "wouldn't", "shouldn't", etc., but of
course these wear their contraction status on their sleeves.
(Although there's a convincing case made by Zwicky and Pullum back in
their 1983 Language article that these are all inflected negatives
rather than true contractions or clitic combos.)

larry