What's so terribly ungrammatical with 'he hasn't a book'?

cftranslate · Post by **cftranslate** » Thu Dec 16, 2004 12:07 am

Talking about his pet peeve in teaching in another post the user Strider says his is non-native teachers who teach sentences like 'He hasn't a book'. Well they say 'He doesn't have a book' in the US while in BrE they usually say 'he hasn't got a book', but does 'he hasn't a book' sound that bad?
Thanks

Lorikeet · Post by **Lorikeet** » Thu Dec 16, 2004 1:46 am

cftranslate wrote:Talking about his pet peeve in teaching in another post the user Strider says his is non-native teachers who teach sentences like 'He hasn't a book'. Well they say 'He doesn't have a book' in the US while in BrE they usually say 'he hasn't got a book', but does 'he hasn't a book' sound that bad?
Thanks

Oh how interesting. I always thought "He hasn't a book." was British English. We use "He hasn't got a book." as well as "He doesn't have a book." in the U.S.

charmedboi82 · Post by **charmedboi82** » Thu Dec 16, 2004 2:00 am

Well, "hasn't he a book?" is not the proper way to make a yes-no question in English. For that, an auxiliary (typically "do/does") is inserted before the main verb, and the auxiliary is then moved to the front of the sentence with the rest following in the same order as in the declarative sentence. It's the same with "have you the time?", it's just not the way to form a yes-no question. However, it's perfectly acceptable in German, and that is where the usage came from although now it's grammatical to add an auxiliary like do/does (or another) before the main verb as stated above.

Kevin

Lorikeet · Post by **Lorikeet** » Thu Dec 16, 2004 4:32 am

Can we get one of our non-American-English speaking native speakers to speak up on this? I always thought "Have you a pen?" was acceptable in British English.

lolwhites · Post by **lolwhites** » Thu Dec 16, 2004 10:04 am

Gorblimey! Have you... to ask about posession sounds a bit odd to me, though earlier generations might disgree with me. Have you got or Do you have are pretty much the standard on this windswept isle. Although I don't have easy access to a corpus, I think you'd be more likely to hear have you got a book? than have you a book?, though I wouldn't go as far as to say the latter was unacceptable or wrong.

Either that or Gotta...? as in gotta light mate?, not forgetting to replace every t with a glottal stop for added authenticity...
"Please, teacher, what is meaning golaimay?"

JuanTwoThree · Post by **JuanTwoThree** » Thu Dec 16, 2004 11:32 am

The occasional "We haven't time!" or "Have you any idea?" may slip out but I'd have said BrE was fairly evenly split between the two "more grammatical" possibilities in question and negative forms.

But I suspect we use "have" much less than "have got" in affirmatives:

"I have too many classes this afternoon/ a hangover"

sounds more natural with "got"

JuanTwoThree · Post by **JuanTwoThree** » Thu Dec 16, 2004 11:46 am

PS

OOPS "I haven't a clue" googles at over 30,000 but "I don't have a clue" and "I haven't got a clue" both have about 10,000 hits each.

Whereas "I haven't a car" gets 27, "I haven't got a car" gets 250 and "I don't have a car" about 700 hits.

Maybe it's only in some fixed expressions that this usage persists.

lolwhites · Post by **lolwhites** » Thu Dec 16, 2004 1:25 pm

But don't forget that Google searches won't distinguish between US, Canadian, UK, Irish, Australian, NZ, South Africa or just good old fashioned bad non-native speaker English and the question was about British English.

Google can't substitute for a proper corpus.

JuliaM · Post by **JuliaM** » Thu Dec 16, 2004 1:40 pm

I'm Australian - does that count? I am much more likely to say Do you have than Have you got, and while Hasn't he a book sounds quaintly formal and old-fashioned, I wouldn't say it's unacceptable.
Slightly off the topic, but still related I think, is when I first started teaching in Canada, I came across Didn't use to, and I honestly thought the textbook was wrong. Australian (and I guess, British) English would say Used not to, but I get funny looks when I say that here.

Julia

lolwhites · Post by **lolwhites** » Thu Dec 16, 2004 1:57 pm

Glad to have an Australian contributing, Julia. In answer to your question, you most certainly do count!

I've been very conscious that on this forum we only really discuss British vs American usage, but I'm not sure anyone here was really qualified to talk about Australian English.

Now, are there any Irish, New Zealanders, South Africans, Caribbeans, Singaporeans etc out there to help us out? C'mon, quit lurking!

Lorikeet · Post by **Lorikeet** » Thu Dec 16, 2004 4:29 pm

lol I've been so careful not to imply that British English is "wrong" in my classes, that I have simply pushed "Do you have..." as the American version and told them that "Have you a book?" wasn't used here. Seems a lot of my students who come from Hong Kong learned "Have you a book?" I've occasionally heard that construction from some "proper Bostonians" as well. Interesting to hear it isn't in high use in England. Live and learn. Now I can tell them it's old-fashioned too.

JuanTwoThree · Post by **JuanTwoThree** » Thu Dec 16, 2004 10:04 pm

When I posted

""I haven't a clue" googles at over 30,000 but "I don't have a clue" and "I haven't got a clue" both have about 10,000 hits each. Whereas "I haven't a car" gets 27, "I haven't got a car" gets 250 and "I don't have a car" about 700 hits. Maybe it's only in some fixed expressions that this usage persists."

I should have mentioned that I was using UK sites only. Which doesn't detract from the inaccuracy of googling, nor tell us much about spoken English. But one might not have expected different ratios between the three possibilities when the noun was changed.

Roger · Post by **Roger** » Fri Dec 17, 2004 4:58 am

I am glad so many of you agreed that "...hasn't a ...(insert noun).." is acceptable though slightly odd. In fact, purely empirically speaking, I come across it rather often.
BUt the OP might care to know that the verb "HAVE/HAS is a full verb that requires an auxiliary verb as soon as the negative "not" comes into the play; thus "he has a book" is alright, but "he hasn't a book" is ungrammatical.
"Have you got..." is a sentence using "have" as an auxiliary verb, and that's what we all learn at school.

strider · Post by **strider** » Fri Dec 17, 2004 8:19 am

Hello everyone,

You know I have always dreamed of being the sort of writer who has his work examined and discussed by eager followers all over the world !

In my original post, I said that my gripe was about :

"teachers who use outdated and ungrammatical English and refuse to change ('He hasn't a book' and 'I will ask to my friend' are the worst offenders). "

I'm really glad we're discussing this expression 'He hasn't a book' because I really don't know if I can call it 'ungrammatical' or simply 'outdated'. It certainly wasn't ungrammatical 50 or 60 years ago (watch old black and white movies starring Basil Rathbone or Errol Flynn and you'll hear it) but now it sounds either terribly old fashioned or just plain 'wrong'. Having said that, a colleague of mine told me that people use this form on the Scottish island of Iona. And I think I've heard Prince Charles use it, too.

On the whole, though, I would say that this form is not generally accepted as modern English so my gripe still stands!

JuanTwoThree · Post by **JuanTwoThree** » Fri Dec 17, 2004 9:15 am

It's much easier to keep quiet and not teach these things. Students who spot them later will have enough level not to worry about any little white lies they've been told.

Nobody has come back to me about correcting "I felled badly yesterday" years earlier because now they know it could have been about doing a bit of incompetent lumberjacking.

(in a pompous voice) Finding out that maybe you "can" after all do something that once you were firmly told you couldn't is certainly part of language learning, if not of the human condition itself

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What's so terribly ungrammatical with 'he hasn't a book'?

What's so terribly ungrammatical with 'he hasn't a book'?

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