sentence with 'with'

[Victoria Neufeldt]

All the replies have so far dealt with other verbs than 'be', which is
what was used in Wilson Gray's original example.  That sentence sounds
really strange to me too.  It doesn't even seem to be associated with
any German usage that I know of.  I can't imagine anyone saying in
German "Sie ist mit."

Victoria


Victoria Neufeldt
727 9th Street East
Saskatoon, Sask.
S7H 0M6
Canada
Tel: 306-955-8910

-----Original Message-----
From: American Dialect Society [mailto:ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU]On
Behalf Of Geoff Nathan
Sent: Wednesday, November 23, 2005 8:47 AM
To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
Subject: Re: ADS-L Digest - 21 Nov 2005 to 22 Nov 2005 (#2005-327)


At 12:10 AM 11/23/2005, you wrote:

It's big in Wisconsin, not too surprisingly.  We always included it
in our intro class dialect survey questionnaires at the UW, along
with "bubbler" (for water fountain) and "berm" (for that strip
between sidewalk and curb that we've been talking about).  And, of
course, positive "anymore".

Larry

Although this is traditionally ascribed to German influence I've
always been skeptical because it's a feature of (at least) Toronto
English (where I grew up) and there's no history there of large-scale
German settlement (Scottish and English in the nineteenth century,
Eastern European, esp. Jewish, Italian and Chinese in the early
twentieth and West Indian/Indian/everything under the sun in the late
twentieth/twenty-first century).  It's always sounded quite normal to
me and my fellow Torontonians, so I suspect some other influence.
Of course, you can say the equivalent in modern colloquial French,
too:  Tu viens avec?, but I'm sure that's not the source of it either.

Geoff
Geoffrey S. Nathan <geoffnathan at wayne.edu>
Faculty Liaison, Computing and Information Technology,
        and Associate Professor of English
Linguistics Program                       Phone Numbers
Department of English                     Computing and Information
Technology:  (313) 577-1259
Wayne State University                    Linguistics (English):
(313) 577-8621
Detroit, MI, 48202                        C&IT Fax: (313) 577-1338