20-03-2019, 09:56 PM
Limiting myself to the "cousin" side of things, I'd take issue with your example of:
Your examples are those of modern abbreviations, or textual conversion of slang. The Corpus of Contemporary American English finds only 114 examples of the word "coz" in printed American English, all of which (at first glance) are either 20th century usage of pronouns or textual transcriptions of people speaking slang.
"Cos" just 1238 usages, much the same.
That isn't how people wrote in the 15th century, and it isn't how people write today.
You get homophones, or misspellings, but these can often be traced back to the teacher who taught the scribe. In the same way as today, you only get street slang when the author is writing a narrative, and even then that is post-renaissance. (Not much hip hop slang in Romance of the Rose).
Yes there is. If the word is used as a conjunction, it's because. If it is used as a noun, it's cousin. End of.
Quote:Example: in casual informal writing such as is common on social media or in text messages today, there are many ways that American English speakers write and/or abbreviate the word "because". We don't always feel like writing out such a long word to express such a simple basic concept in a function word. In one post or comment or message or text, a person might write it "because", but in another he or she might write it "becos", and in other places the same person might write it "cos" or "cuz" or "coz" or " 'cause" or " 'cos". There is not necessarily an explicit rule that we can state to determine how this person will "convert" the word "because" into any one of these many forms in any given place in the text or at any given moment. So therefore we cannot determine an explicit rule to apply in order to take any given one of these forms that we find and "convert the text back" into "because".
Your examples are those of modern abbreviations, or textual conversion of slang. The Corpus of Contemporary American English finds only 114 examples of the word "coz" in printed American English, all of which (at first glance) are either 20th century usage of pronouns or textual transcriptions of people speaking slang.
"Cos" just 1238 usages, much the same.
That isn't how people wrote in the 15th century, and it isn't how people write today.
You get homophones, or misspellings, but these can often be traced back to the teacher who taught the scribe. In the same way as today, you only get street slang when the author is writing a narrative, and even then that is post-renaissance. (Not much hip hop slang in Romance of the Rose).
Quote: There is no explicit rule you can establish to determine when to convert "cuz" into "because", as opposed to when to convert "cuz" into "cousin". The decision must be based on the overall linguistic context of the statement and the conversation.
Yes there is. If the word is used as a conjunction, it's because. If it is used as a noun, it's cousin. End of.