Amn't I

Assuming there's more than one ant inhabiting the nest, it's "ants' nest". You write down who or what owns the nest (= ants) and then put the apostrophe after it.

Now you have opened up a new hornet's hornets' hornets nest BradfordLass

I have just posted on another thread, 'ant's nest...'

Now I'm wondering if it should be 'ants' nest'
Or ants nest

And recently heard in a long list of reason why a man should not marry her, the girl said,
'....And then there's I'

???

mcem, yes but the bit in inverted commas is what somebody else wrote.

I was born in Scotland and lived most of my life there so I agree with you. It's too bad any school teacher would object to any regional dialect, except perhaps its use in a business letter.

alexa that doesn't happen in Scotland. 'Aren't I' just is not used!

" I've heard plenty of people saying 'amn't I' but if anyone said it in school they were corrected to 'aren't I'."

I am shocked. I wonder where your teacher was trained.

To me, amn't is correct anyway - "I am not" turned into a question.
It's incorrect to say "I are not".
OHO "aren't you...." etc is correct.

I agree that in Scotland and NI, "amn't I?" is normal. If you say "Am I or amn't I?", you can see the logic of it - we don't say "I are" or "I aren't", so "aren't I" is the form that's an aberration.

Hear, hear Mr G!

DH says: "A long life and a Scottish education has raised no difficulty with amn't I. As with aren't I a small e is introduced to make pronunciation easier.
I regard amn't I as the correct original (though increasingly archaic) version of the Queen's English".

Just been reading Kirsty Wark's new novel "The House By The Loch" set in Galloway and "amn't" is used quite a lot. I don't use it myself but I rather like it.

In the Black Country, it's 'Ay I?' but DS1 used to say 'Amnt I?' when he was small.

I've heard plenty of people saying 'amn't I' but if anyone said it in school they were corrected to 'aren't I'.

I find this interesting after the posts in Pedants' Corner, by those who are irritated by the way some of us speak.

Language both evolves, and retains parts of old dialects / languages. Where I live, we have quite a distinctive way of referring to 'my' or 'our' something. There are also a few verbs where we use a noun instead of the usual verb, and it then follows its own particular declension. We are not 'wrong', just not 'standard'. I use these in everyday speech, not in any formal setting.

Sorry, 'those of us'. I mean people in both parts of this island.

I say 'amn't I'. In my experience it is normal for those of who are Scots Irish and Hiberno English speakers to say 'amn't. I am interested to read that Scottish people do likewise.

Ps. "I'm not" is equally common but not "aren't i".

You're right there baggs. Still used widely in Dundee.
What bugs me far more is the intrusive (southern) r eg Annar Adams for which there is no logical grammatical reason!

It's part of my idiolect, having been brought up in Scotland, but I can understand that the consonant cluster 'mnt' doesn't sit well in southern speech. As I have lived longer south of the Border than north, I do find myself sometimes using 'aren't I?' which isn't even grammatical! My Norther Irish DiL is with me on this.

It's not wrong in Dundee, farnorth, not among the Dundee folk I knew, anyway.

I assume, but don't know, that the logical form "Amn't I?" is more difficult to say due to m, said by closing the lips, being followed by n, which is formed by placing the tip of the tongue against the front of the hard palate.

Logically, we should say inpossible, but n before p gives the same sort of problem, so the word became impossible.

Anyone with a good knowlege of phonetics to back my assumption up?

We use it here in Northern Ireland. We might also pronounce it ... amn’ta.

I've never heard it before - not even from my Scottish friends!

I speak lowland Scots and say amn't I or am I not. People who speak foreign dialects say aren't I.

I heard it a lot in Scotland.

Never heard it here as we say "Ain't I?"