Re: USAGE: Weird dialectal stuff
| From: | Nik Taylor <fortytwo@...> |
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| Date: | Tuesday, January 11, 2000, 0:58 |
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raccoon@ELKNET.NET wrote:
> where did the phrase "must needs" come from? I only started hearing
> it/seeing it a few years ago, but apparently it's used in some older
> versions of the Bible, etc. It always seemed really strange to me,
> first of all, because "needs" seems to me to be a conjugated form of
> "to need," and second, because it seems redundant.
I think that in "must needs", "needs" is the genitive of "need"; the
genitive was once far more widely used in English than it is now, as
preserved in forms like "besides" and the like.
--
"Old linguists never die - they just come to voiceless stops." -
anonymous
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