the verbs SUBSTITUTE

[Wilson Gray]

On Tue, Apr 26, 2011 at 2:21 PM, Joel Berson <berson at att.net> wrote:
> becoming widespread in the U.K. only about twenty years ago

I agree wholeheartedly with that.

I should check out the following and, perhaps I will, if enough people
suggest that I'm living in a dream.

IAC, it seems to me that some common foreign languages, e.g. German,
Russian, French, normally use what those of a certain age regard as an
oddball, unnecessarily-obfuscatory - i.e. "backward" - innovation in
English. I mean this as only a perhaps-incorrect observation about
other languages and not as a suggestion that some other language may
have introduced the relevant syntactic structure into English, despite
the fact that, IME, the "backward" form appeared earlier in academic
writing in the field of linguistics than it did in colloquial writing.

WRT to occurrence of the structure in speech of whatever register,
further deponent sayeth not.

--
-Wilson
-----
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint
to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-Mark Twain

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