Q: I thought I might further muddy the waters of the wonderful word featured in your post about “dasn’t.” I once saw it defined as a contraction of “darest not,” but frustratingly I can’t recall the source. I first saw “dasn’t” as a youngster reading the Huck Finn novel you mention.
A: In “I dasn’t scratch,” our 2009 post (updated in 2022), we include “dasn’t” among the many dialectal contractions of “dare not.”
As we say in that post, the negative “dare” contractions in the Dictionary of Regional American English include “daren’t,” “durn’t,” “dursent,” “durstn’t,” “ders(e)n’t,” “daredn’t,” “dar(e)sn’t,” “darshin,” “das(s)n’t,” “das(s)ent,” and “dazzent.”
Similarly, Merriam-Webster online describes “dasn’t,” “dass’nt,” and less commonly “dassent” as dialectal versions of “dare not.”
However, the DARE and Merriam-Webster entries raise this question: How did “daren’t,” the most obvious (and standard) contraction of “dare not,” end up as the dialectal shortening “dasn’t”?
A “Word History” item in Merriam-Webster answers by describing “dasn’t” as “partly contraction of (thou) darst not” (from Middle English), partly contraction of (he) dares not.”
As for your suggestion, we haven’t seen any authoritative source that describes “dasn’t” as a contraction of “darest not.” But we’ve found some plausible comments from readers of reputable websites suggesting that “darest not” might have become “dasn’t” through the loss of the “r” sound before “s” by assimilation, as in “cuss” for “curse” and “bust” for “burst.”
The linguist Anatoly Liberman discusses this loss of the “r” sound in “Do you ‘cuss’ your stars when you go ‘bust’?” a 2012 post on the OUPblog of Oxford University Press. Liberman doesn’t mention “dasn’t,” but a comment by a reader, John Cowan, cites the contraction of “darest not” to “dasn’t” as an example of “r”-loss:
“Some other examples are passel ‘large amount’ < parcel, gal > girl, palsy ultimately from paralysis, and many more that are archaic, like skasely < scarcely, hoss < horse, podner < partner, and dasn’t < darest not.”
And in “Old-timey contractions,” a 2022 post by the linguist Mark Liberman on the Language Log, reader John Swindle, commenting on possible “r” loss examples, suggests “dasn’t” could be “a contraction of ‘darest not,’ ” and not limited to “singular or even to present tense.”
What do we think? Well, it’s not impossible that “dasn’t” evolved as a contraction of “darest not.” But until we see some solid evidence, we dasn’t commit ourselves.
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