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Day: March 31, 2016

Is it acceptable to use “with” without an object? For example. I’m coming with. I hear this lately in Southern California. Is this correct?

By: | Post date: 2016-03-31 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: English, Linguistics

It’s a regionally restricted colloquialism, and outside of those regions it sounds odd. I’m surprised to hear it’s showing up in SoCal and Hawaii. I was aware of it in New York English, under Yiddish influence, and South Australian English, under German influence. EDIT: looks like I got my Germanic-influenced American dialects mixed up: not […]

History: Which cultures or societies went from being literate to illiterate? As in a script becoming extinct or some other reason.

By: | Post date: 2016-03-31 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Other Languages, Writing Systems

This is a mythological rather than factual answer, but: The Hmong people were illiterate, but they lived at the crossroads of a bunch of literate cultures—the Chinese, the Thai, the Vietnamese, the Laotians. The Hmong noticed. And they figured that they must not always have been the downtrodden illiterates that they were: surely they too […]

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