On Tue, 11 Oct 2011 18:42:48 +0100 Lisi <lisi.re...@gmail.com> dijo: >On Tuesday 11 October 2011 18:32:02 Dom wrote: >> In this part of England (South East, just a little North of London), >> "dunno" is common. I would even use it myself sometimes. > >But would you write it? If so, perhaps it is an age thing. Are you >young?
It is more involved than that. Speakers of all human language use different registers in different situations, both in the spoken and the written language. Think of how differently you speak to a professor at your university and the way you speak when alone with your best friend. There are many, many different registers, some of which vary only slightly from each other. Sometimes there is also a sociolinguistic effect. One example might be where speakers use different forms of language to maintain distance or closeness. If you speak Spanish, think of how speakers of some dialects use tú, vos and usted in various extremely complex social alternations. For example, once while in Panama I overhead the conversation of a married couple, where they switched between tú and vos, the latter when annoyed, but they used usted with the ticket agent they were talking to. I speak Spanish (mostly north-central Mexico) and English (mostly western U.S.). When speaking Spanish the [d] intervocalically just about disappears, and when it is part of a grammatical suffix like -ado, it is completely gone. But when writing I still write the d, e.g., 'pasado.' Having said that, if I am speaking Spanish in an address to a large audience, I pronounce the [d] more forcefully. As for the English 'dunno,' it is an attempt at using the lame orthography of English to describe the pronunciation in rapid speech, which is [dǝ'now], not [downt now]. It is perfectly acceptable in informal writing such as is common here. It would be completely unacceptable in an academic paper. You won't find it even in newspapers, the lowest bastion of stylistic correctness. One thing is clear, however. Writing 'don't know' is always acceptable. 'Dunno' may be acceptable, but if you use it inappropriately for the register you are in, it will look bad, possibly even mildly offensive. -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20111011113342.2579d...@mailhost.pdx.edu
