Timeline for Using "there're" to abbreviate "there are"
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
12 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
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| Apr 4, 2022 at 11:38 | comment | added | FumbleFingers | That was me over 10 years ago! Thanks in no small part to your own contributions here over the years, I now understand that to a first approximation, grammar and orthography are orthogonal concepts! (The latter being more "trivial", imho, but I do take some pride in the fact that I know when it's it's and when it's its! :) | |
| Apr 4, 2022 at 3:55 | comment | added | John Lawler | Well, you're probly right. But confusing spelling with English grammar is common and confusing and the source of a large percentage of problems and questions here. | |
| Apr 4, 2022 at 3:50 | history | edited | John Lawler | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
added 12 characters in body
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| Sep 9, 2020 at 15:09 | history | edited | John Lawler | CC BY-SA 4.0 |
added 62 characters in body
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| Jan 15, 2012 at 14:00 | vote | accept | kettlepot | ||
| Jan 15, 2012 at 3:31 | comment | added | FumbleFingers | Anyway, I fully understand that from a "professional" point of view, you would be far more concerned with pronunciation than orthography. But insofar as ELU is concerned, I tend to think it's mostly about the written forms (maybe partly because, as you say, we're not exactly communicating through a good medium for sound). | |
| Jan 15, 2012 at 3:26 | comment | added | FumbleFingers | Yes, well I freely admit that my speech isn't exactly a role model. I still remember my first linguistics class at college 40 years ago - the lecturer thought I was so odd he had me read various sentences out to the whole class for about five minutes (unless I make a real effort, I don't distinguish, for example, fall, full, four, fool). We didn't have many undergraduates from "peasant stock" in the UK back then, so I was a bit of a curiosity. When I went home for Christmas after the first term, everyone thought I was affecting a lah-di-dah accent (my speech had imperceptibly changed! :) | |
| Jan 15, 2012 at 3:18 | comment | added | John Lawler | Third, there're consists mostly in reducing the /a/ of are to /ə/, which -- even if it does result in losing a syllable, as your pronunciation would -- still requires reliably producing and perceiving a long final rhotic vowel distinction that English otherwise doesn't have. Not easy to maintain, generation to generation; singular is simpler. | |
| Jan 15, 2012 at 3:15 | comment | added | John Lawler | Second, for speakers of many languages, sequences like there're, mirror, squirrel, and even my name, /'lɔlər/, are very hard to pronounce. And we Anglophones vary quite a lot in how we use our resonants, even though we can usually tune to one another with a little practice. | |
| Jan 15, 2012 at 3:11 | comment | added | John Lawler | Well, first of all, a lot -- maybe the majority -- of our readers are not native English speakers, and the rest is split among all the Anglophone nations, so there's a LOT of individual variation. The internet, even with italics, boldface, and the IPA, is not the best discussion medium for phenomena that vary socially. | |
| Jan 15, 2012 at 1:31 | comment | added | FumbleFingers | I don't know if this is a US/UK thing, but I recall there was another answer where I didn't see why you said some sequence was "difficult to say". When I say there're I only enunciate a single "r" anyway - the only difference for me is in the contracted version I reduce the "ɑː" in "are" to a neutral vowel (schwa). Anyway, I'm not supposing OP is asking whether he can reasonably use the contraction in speech (which may indeed depend on his "dexterity of articulation"). I assume he wants to know if it's okay to write it thus. | |
| Jan 15, 2012 at 1:02 | history | answered | John Lawler | CC BY-SA 3.0 |