Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2011 October 2

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October 2

Sorry A Know I Know

May someone please explain this weird construction for me. Is it regional? Or common? --Omidinist (talk) 07:15, 2 October 2011 (UTC)

Context? rʨanaɢ (talk) 07:30, 2 October 2011 (UTC)

It appears only once on the internet, in a short story called "The Soul Cages" by Thomas Crofton Croker, Ireland's pioneer folklorist, who was born in Cork, Jan. 15, 1798. Search for the phrase here: [[1]]. Dominus Vobisdu (talk) 07:46, 2 October 2011 (UTC)

Sorry. The correct form is Sorrow a know I knows and the context is this short story. --Omidinist (talk) 07:57, 2 October 2011 (UTC)

To reduce that to a manageable length, here are paras 9 and 10:

"Where can they be?" asked the master, with a strong accent on the auxiliary verb.
"Sorrow a know I knows," said the man.

The OED says sorrow a is an emphatic negative, citing the passage from Croker (which is correctly "sorrow a know I know") and several Scottish usages as examples; and in context a know just seems to mean "a thing that is known". So the man is saying that he knows absolutely nothing about it. The whole phrase is used not just by Croker and the Irishman in the Ingoldsby legend but by quite a few other Irish characters [2]. Perhaps there's something in Gaelic that would explain the odd construction? --Antiquary (talk) 10:27, 2 October 2011 (UTC)

This pdf file from Dublin´s Trinity College deals with the Iberno-English roots of the Sorrow / Devil negation.. --Cookatoo.ergo.ZooM (talk) 12:21, 2 October 2011 (UTC)

Thank you all. --Omidinist (talk) 16:25, 2 October 2011 (UTC)