Tryna gonna to
In a recent languagelog post, Mark Liberman, discusses briefly two orthographic contractions, tryna (= trying to) and finna (= fixing to). He wonders,
I wonder why “gonna” and “wanna” have been standard non-standard orthography for so long, while “tryna” has lagged? Is it because the contraction is newer — you couldn’t prove that by me, I’ve used all of them from the cradle — or because “tryna” is just orthographically weirder?
I’d have to guess that a combination of orthorgraphic oddness and frequency are to blame for the nonproliferation of tryna (dialectal factors playing a larger role, perhaps, with finna). Google reports around 3 million hits for “want to” and 1 million for “going to,” which went way against my expectations. The BNC, on the other hand, has more even numbers, with “want to” at around 29000″ and “going to” at 34000. Even including all the inflectional variants of want only gets you about 45000 results. “Trying to,” on the other hand, gives around 90 million ghits and 16000 BNC hits. Corpus linguists and statisticians can figure out what, if anything, that means anything with respect to frequency, phonological reduction, and grammaticalization.
And speaking of grammaticalization, I did what I am often wont to do: I searched for fun combinations of “tryna” in google. Some highlights:
- why is bush actin like he tryna gonna get osama?
- i know one of you internet thugz gonna tryna to argue wit me
- soon or later you might tryna eat my legs
- lame attempt at tryna be funny
Ah, it’s beautiful. And as a side note, I stumbled upon an absolutely hilarious (and somewhat wrong (in the “shouldn’t really exist” sense)) way of writing forum: 4orum. Dude.
Comments(2)
“4orum” is hilarious. It’s like the NYT headline that embarrassingly (at least, I was embarrassed for them) read “D8ting.” Listen to what your numbers sound like, people!
Part of “tryna” not being orthographically popular probably has to do with pronunciation issues. “Gonna” and “wanna” can pretty much only be pronounced one way: the double N means you would probably never say /o/ or /e/, or even /a/ or /æ/ (respectively). “Y”, on the other hand, is tricky: Is it /trainə/ or /trinə/ or /trɪnə/ ? I guess it has to do with there being only one N + vowel, so the Y takes the /ai/ sound?
Wait. Where’s the double N in “tryna,” BTW? “Trynna” gets some hits, but not as many as “tryna.” I’m sending Mark Liberman an email right now. (No really, I am.)
I’m guessing the paucity of “finna” also has to do with the fact that you could confuse it with meaning “find + a”, as in “I’m gonna finna way.” Or something.
Ah, didn’t consider the lack of a double n. “Trynna” looks like it should be pronounced with an /ɪ/. However, there were a few examples of “tryna” I found that were actually names, probably pronounced like “Trina.”
As a side note, if you haven’t used the a lemmatized corpus (to search for these guys), the BNC lemmatizer (and probably the one that PropBank uses) lists “gon” and “wan” as wordforms of the lexemes go and want, and “na” as a form of to. Fun stuff.