缩写简介

hello grammarians hello David hello Paige so today we're gonna talk about contractions which are another use for our friend the apostrophe so David what is a contraction so something that apostrophes are really good at doing is showing when letters are missing from a word right so let's say we have something like the two-word phrase I will so in linguistics I'm told there's this idea called the principle of least effort but I'm not linguist Paige you are what is the principle of least effort so that's kind of a fancy way of saying people like to be lazy sure which is you know tends to be accurate across language so you know we can say something like I will but honestly that kind of takes a lot of effort to say right I have to articulate the mouth in this particular way it's just easier to just collapse all of that into one you know one syllable one sound to say Iowa and when we do that we use an apostrophe to indicate the missing letters that missing wit sound that's a contraction so most modal verbs right if you remember modal auxiliaries from the verbs section we use those a lot in English and so it's really easy to combine those with most words or pronouns into a contraction so you could take the phrase she would which is a lot of letters to say takes a lot of letters to write and we can turn that into with the help of our friend the apostrophe the word she'd means the same thing yeah that's pretty amazing I mean this tiny apostrophe stands in the place of all of these letters yeah that's doing a lot of work have I got a deal for you Paige how would you like three letters for the price of four with because you can shorten you know something like he is - he's right yeah I mean that's what the principle you were talking about is all about like he is isn't that hard to say but he's is a lot easier so this is pretty straightforward but there are some kind of strange uses of contractions some strange uses of the apostrophe that don't seem as immediately evident on their face so for example if you contract the phrase will not into a single contraction it doesn't it doesn't turn into wilt it turns into won't so in this case the apostrophe stands in the place of this oh but all these letters disappear and they're kind of unaccounted for it's weird it's like the Bermuda Triangle of punctuation marks they all just kind of got sucked up into that that apostrophe never to be seen again who knows where they went but there aren't a ton of those there's won't there's don't but okay but not to take away from our original point this is what the apostrophe does when it's working to contract right it just takes letters from the middle of a word and it takes them away it stands in for the fact that there are letters missing you got it cool so I will goes to aisle she would become she'd he is becomes he's and will not becomes won't so that's contractions you can learn anything Dave it out page out