So in class today, my first year teacher was reviewing how you contract "is not," "am not," and "are not," and it occurred to me that this is truly strange. Why can you say
- I'm not going
- I amn't going
After all, you can say
- You're not serious
- You aren't serious
- He's not serious
- He isn't serious
Hopefully, you all can say those variants and my English is not becoming strange. Although, as others have noticed, one of the costs of practicing linguistics is that you start to lose your ability to make grammaticality judgments in your native language.
Cheers
