Mark Twain New York. The Langdon family plot is marked by a 12-foot monument (two fathoms, or "mark twain") placed there by his surviving daughter Clara. There is also a smaller headstone. He expressed a preference for cremation (for example, in "Life on the Mississippi"), but he acknowledged that his surviving family would have the last word. Officials in Connecticut and New York estimated the value of Twain's estate at $471,000 ($ today). Twain began his career writing light, humorous verse, but he became a chronicler of the vanities, hypocrisies, and murderous acts of mankind. At mid-career, he combined rich humor, sturdy
Old English grammar and its imperative and participle forms from "bēon". (Modern German had an analogous, but even more complicated, development for its verb "sein".) In late OE and ME, the form "earon"/"earun", from the Old Norse "erun", replaced bēoþ and sind (See also List of English words of Old Norse origin). Old English is an inflected language, and as such its nouns, pronouns, adjectives and determiners must be declined in order to serve a grammatical function. A set of declined forms of the same word pattern is called a declension. As in several other ancient Germanic languages, there are five major cases: