this post was submitted on 31 Mar 2024
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English usage and grammar
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Contracted “not” (-n’t) can only apply to auxiliary verbs and main verb “be” (copulas are strange ). Because poetic forms like “She knows not the way” are not ungrammatical to native speakers, I suspect that they were once more commonly used and survive today as art and perhaps some ritual speech. But they were likely not contracted.
Subject-verb inversion for question formation is common among Indo-European languages. In modern English, it’s only done with auxiliaries to form yes/no questions, but again it may have been done with main verbs in the past.
If you’re really interested, check out a good English linguistics course.