1566: On Contractions Mar 29, 2019

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Most English contractions make sense how they came to be, even if a vowel might change a bit from something like "do" to "don't". However, with the exception of 'won't, which is a jarring contraction of will+not (even if historically it was woll+not) this only covers contractions that are also then able to be split apart again, unlike words like 'howdy' from "how do you do?", or 'goodbye' from "G-d be with you". Nevertheless, one that makes arguably less sense than "won't" but still is parsable is "dasn't" from 'dare not'. In this case, the extra S comes from "he dares not", but "dasn't" can be used alongside any pronoun, including 'I' and 'you'.
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