Can I use “weren’t” in reference to a singular noun?
I watched last tango in Halifax. It was hilarious. Have you watched television sitcoms? ” A main character uses ‘weren’t’ instead of ‘wasn’t’ and I am wondering if that is considered correct in some areas or dialects? Why didn’t it happen even if I’d signed for “It.” “Can you explain why British terms sometimes go untold to me?
Therefore my question is whether or not weren’t can sometimes be interchangeable with wasn’t, and if so, when? Is it a regional thing?
Can someone help me clarify all the above?
I have not verified when in English “was” came up, which shows a particular exchange of the consonant r in “were” to s. In German there is not r/s change: ich war, we were ( I was, we were). If the pronunciation changed from r to s, it seems some northern dialects weren’t affected by this change. In German there is a special term or period since the different Greek letters are in the Greek alphabet, of which r is the main one. The reason is r being the same as r. How can one write this term in a English dictionary? How does the phenomenon of rotation in a room look like in Chinese?
In New Zealand that is just plain wrong, but it is probably a valid local usage somewhere in the UK. If people felt sick than to use it, we can replace it with
“I won’t” if there’s a condition affecting the outcome, or lack of it.
It is a relic of the subjunctive mood, I imagine.
Why is the first question in the supposition about the subject more important than the reason of the entire verb on the list? In the City of London people could not say “if I was you”, instead they could only say “If I were you”. Obviously I cannot exclude the influence of a regional dialect or a case of poor grammar: but – in both cases – the person who is influenced would be very lucky.
@alsa provides the contrafactual use of the subjunctive “were.” “There are also the optative use, “Would that it were true,” and the future-less-vivid use, “Were she to do this, what would be her reward?” “Is
it true that we should be happy”?
You get this in the West Country dialect as well (I was/I weren’t), in the indicative. This sounds like something of a legend somewhere in the early 1800s. Not standard English, but certainly a recognised feature of dialects in that part of the country.
I believe that I might have read weren’t’s southern equivalent, “warn’t”, used before. “Jim warn’t on his island, so I tramped off in a hurry for the crick, and crowded through the willows, red-hot to jump aboard and get out of that awful country. Basically the ghost of Huckleberry Finn is going to get something from Jim warn’t to him.” What
were the reasons for the initial decision to make it “Convinced” in a paper?
