Is it acceptable to use “with” without an object? For example. I’m coming with. I hear this lately in Southern California. Is this correct?

It’s a regionally restricted colloquialism, and outside of those regions it sounds odd.

I’m surprised to hear it’s showing up in SoCal and Hawaii. I was aware of it in New York English, under Yiddish influence, and South Australian English, under German influence.

EDIT: looks like I got my Germanic-influenced American dialects mixed up: not New York, but Upper Midwest, and not Yiddish, but likelier Swedish.

And here’s the PhD dissertation on the subject: A cross -dialectal, multi -field, variation” by John M Spartz

How do you say “happy birthday” in Greek? How do you write it as part of a sentence?

Originally Answered:

What is the correct way of saying “happy birthday” in Greek?

Χρόνια Πολλά (khronya pola), “many years!” Applicable to any anniversary, and to saint’s days (which are the real cultural equivalent of birthdays).

History: Which cultures or societies went from being literate to illiterate? As in a script becoming extinct or some other reason.

This is a mythological rather than factual answer, but:

The Hmong people were illiterate, but they lived at the crossroads of a bunch of literate cultures—the Chinese, the Thai, the Vietnamese, the Laotians. The Hmong noticed. And they figured that they must not always have been the downtrodden illiterates that they were: surely they too used to have writing.

The legend was that, when they were literate, they were migrating across a river, and as they did, their horses ate their books.

Any resemblance to “the dog ate my homework” is fortuitous.

This meant that the Hmong invested much messianic expectation in the restoration of literacy. Which explains the enthusiasm with which the Hmong embraced the Romanized Popular Alphabet, promulgated by missionaries such as William Smalley. It also explains the curious history of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pa… script—and the messianic cult around its martyred originator, Shong Lue Yang, the “Mother of Writing”.  

Smalley cowrote the biography of Yang, Mother of Writing, with Yang’s chief disciple. It is touchingly respectful.