[Gllug] Monthly GLLUG grammar report
Tethys
tet at accucard.com
Tue Nov 26 13:30:49 UTC 2002
Dylan writes:
>> I thought that Innit was imported from the Caribbean, but I could be wrong.
>
>You're absolutely right! The ancestral African languages which fed the
>formation of the Caribbean Pigins and Creoles have sentence-final question
>particles, equivalent to our echo questions:
>
>He's going to the pub, is (-n't) he?
In which case, how do you explain its prevalence among Greeks and
Cypriots (and more recently, among the Asian community)? Harry
Enfield's Stavros may have been comedy, but what made it work was that
we've all seen it before in real life, innit. More recently, Ali G has
done exactly the same -- if the community he's parodying didn't really
say "innit" after every sentence, it wouldn't work...
Tet
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