By Prepositions, Dialects

Wow, what a lot of nonesense.Is American English simply lazy English with disregard for the fundamentals of the language, or is it a valid simplification of an overly complex and irregular language?Huh? What are you talking about? I was hoping nobody would ask, but since you did, I much...

Certain dialects in the Upper Midwest with a German substratum will sometimes devoice final consonants, therefore 'of' would sound something like

I　choose "in your absence". In some dialects, "while" is said to be used as a preposition to mean "up to" (like "while Doomsday") but in standard English, (as far as I know), "while" is not used as a preposition.paco

Historic Lughnasadh Lughnasadh is a harvest celebration named for Lugh (Irish), Llew (Welsh), Lug (Britonic),or Lugus, the Celtic sun god. Lugh was one of the most popular of the Celtic gods. He gave his name to many towns around Europe including Lugdunum (Lyons) and perhaps even Londinium...

OED The gerund still retains one feature of the verbal noun, namely, that of admitting of a preceding possessive case or possessive pronoun, as in "after John's behaving so strangely", "upon my readily granting it". In the literary language this construction is regularly retained with a pronoun,...

I may have spoken too hastily... In the Little/Small thread in the Vocab section, khoff perceptively says that ' sounds like a childish vocabulary selection'. I think this is true. In the instances where I've heard adults use 'little' in this way, there has usually been an element of humour or...

Hello Hanuman In the examples on that page, I would have said that 'while' was acting as a conjunction. But others may differ. (I only know 'while = preposition' in some local English dialect or historic uses, to mean 'until'. But that isn't ordinary current English.) MrP

mountainhiker: If it were that simple, then all native English speakers would be highly proficient in speaking, reading, and writing. Unfortunately, they ain't. Moreover, listening is trivial. Monkey's can listen to English all day, but I am not sure you want to have a long conversation with a...

Yet, how can you say that "There are a lot of people" is correct? The noun phrase (a lot - singular) and the verb (are - plural) are at odds with each other. One does not use a singular article ("a") if it is meant to be plural, correct? The fact that "people" is plural is entirely immaterial as...

Possibly, though I'm not at all certain, this use of "about" is really old fashioned English. ..., ..., ..., ... Hold the phone! I may be wrong about the old-fashioned part. I googled and got, >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> http://www.fortunecity.com/bally/durrus/153/gramch26.html It should also be...