--- In cybalist@..., "Ash" <equinus100@...> wrote:
>
>
> One clarification of my point before I proceed, in case some people
missed it: the whole point is, why Latin plurals (and cases, and
conjugations, and gender and deponents and what not) in English as
they were used in Latin? What we emprunt are the words (roots, pre-
and suffixes.) Everything else done on them is using English (or
modern) devices.
This question probably needs a thesis to answer it. I strongly
suspect it depends on the two languages involved. I will just rush
through the cases where I know something:
Greek to Latin:
The nouns were inflected using the Greek endings where the two
systems were directly comparable. This is more noticeable in poetry
than prose. This was overwhelmingly a late, learnèd phenomenon.
It
is complicated enough that Latin text books teach the versions of the
declension for the Greek nouns. The more oblique cases have the Lain
endings.
Latin had a more extensive case system than Greek. The nominative
singular of most Greek nouns contains a flexional ending, but can be
identified with a Latin one. (A striking case is Latin Plato: for
Greek Plato:n - this is a regular correspondence between the two.)
The gender systems correspond.
Although the nominative and accusative inflections can be readily
mapped between the two systems, they are rarely identical even when
converted to Latin sounds. The common, well matching systems are:
1st decl: Latinised Greek a:, a:n; ae, a:s v. Latin a, am; ae, a:s
e:, e:n; ae, a:s v. Latin a, am; ae, a:s
a:s, a:n; ae, a:s v. Latin a, am; ae, a:s
e:s, e:n; ae, a:s v. Latin a, am; ae, a:s
2nd decl: Latinised Greek os, on; oe, u:s v. Latin us, um; i:, o:s
ros, ron; roe, ru:s v. Latin er, (e)rum; (e)
ri:, (e)ro:s
on, on; a, a v. Latin um, um; a, a
3rd decl Latinised Greek is, in; i:s, i:s v. Latin is, em/im;
e:s, e:s
x, ca; ces, cas v. Latin x, cem;
ce:s, ce:s
o:n, o:na; o:nes, o:nas v. Latin o:, o:nem;
o:ne:s, o:ne:s
o:n, ona; o:nes, o:nas v. Latin o:, inem;
ine:s, ine:s
There are other patterns that match well, but some that don't match
up.
My feeling is that if you have been schooled in the Greek
declensions, and often criticised for mangling the endings, you will
think twice before completely Latinising the Greek inflexions on the
fly.
Latin to German:
Nouns are inflected using the full Latin system. I would presume
that this is a learned phenomenon. The nominative singular of a
Latin noun already contains a flexional ending, sometimes subtractive!
The German cases are a subset of the Latin system. German plurals
are fairly irregular.
The gender systems correspond.
Why the German system should be so complicated, I do not know.
Perhaps it is just a carry-over from when German replaced Latin. Do
any other modern languages follow this pattern?
Arabic to Persian:
Only the pausal forms are used - case is not an issue.
Modern Arabic and Persian do not have case inflections. (You might
want to count the definite object suffix, but that is used
indifferently (almost) with Persian nouns, Arabic nouns, and
pronouns.) Persian plural formation is (now) very regular.
Persian does not have gender any more than English does - in fact, if
anything, less so.
It is not at all obvious to me why one should feel compelled to use
the Arabic plural. (There is supposed not to be any compulsion
nowadays.) It is just conceivable that the Persian animate plural
looked like the Arabic dual, and was thus avoided to avoid looking as
though one had got it wrong.
English to Thai:
Borrowed nouns are not inflected. But then, as a first
approximation, Thai has no inflections. Thai has a classificatory
system, but it seems to be semantically based, and it has no
interaction with any English features. Borrowed nouns can readily
acquire what you might call a class prefix; this is not the same as
the classifier. (Examples are <rot ben> = 'merc', <rot ciip> = 'land
rover' for various classes of motor vehicle :))
Aramaic to Modern Hebrew:
Some borrowed nouns are inflected in Aramaic. Spoken modern Hebrew
plurals are irregular. The gender systems are the same. I cannot
see any necessity for nouns to be inflected in Aramaic. Perhaps it
simply reflects a period of bilingual scholarship.
Latin to English:
English nouns do not display case, and Latin nouns are borrowed in
the nominative and only inflected for number, not for case.
For second declension Latin nouns in -us, there are two modes of
borrowing - with and without the ending. When nouns are borrowed
without the ending, they undergo normal English inflections.
Dinosaur names in -saurus are a productive example - brontosaur v.
brontosaurus (or _Brontosaurus_, for these are generic names).
Perhaps this holds the key. If the singular is 'brontosaur', then
there is no question that it will be pluralised as 'brontosaurs'.
The English plural of 'brontosaurus' is 'brontosauruses', and English
has a traditional objection to ending a word in multiple sibilants -
cf. the endingless possessives, such as "Jesus'". Moreover, if one
has gone to the trouble of adding the syllable 'us' to keep a Latin
appearance, one might as well go the whole hog and replace it by 'i'.
Keeping to the field of palaeontology, it occurs to me that in fact
there are several other schemes for naturalising generic names. The
subfamily name yields a noun/adjective in -ine, and it would appear
that 'australopithecines' is used to avoid saying 'australopitheci'
or 'australopithecuses', and likewise I suspect the family name is
similarly used to naturalise names in '-suchus' as '-suchid'.
None of this explains what is happening with Latin nouns in -um and -
a.
The treatment of the Latin 3rd declension is more interesting. Only
three patterns are common: -ex, -ices (e.g. index); -ix, -ices (e.g.
matrix); -sis, -ses (e.g. oasis). The last one may be maintained by
euphony; in speech, I even use the pattern to make the plural
of 'diocese'. It is possible that some of the above forms are
maintained by a combination of the plural being relative common and
mellifluousness. I remember having to learn that the plural
of 'suffix' was not 'suffices'.
I will cut short this exposition on the noun before it does turn into
a thesis.
I suspect the genesis of the use of the foreign inflections is that
the user of these words and his audience had both been formally
taught the foreign language. Adding the wrong endings to often
already inflected words would smack of ignorance, reducing the
credibility of the user. (I'm not sure how far this argument is
applicable to Arabic and Persian.)
Verbs are a very different matter. It can be very difficult for an
inflecting language to borrow a verb from another, dissimilar
inflecting language. Middle English managed to do it from French,
but there may have been enough similarity. Even then, some verbs,
e.g. 'render', were taken over in their infinitive form. There is a
curious pattern - 3rd conjugation verbs could be taken over from
Latin in their present stem, but otherwise the supine stem was used
as the stem. This is the only manner in which English can be said to
follow the Latin conjugations. German solved the problem of
borrowing French verbs by inflecting the infinitive, whence the -
ieren suffix that has spread through the continental Germanic
languages.
In none of these cases have foreign inflections been borrowed
directly. English has derived two inflections from Latin - the agent
noun (in -er) and a passive verbal adjective in (-able) - that it can
apply to any semantically suitable verb, and one further, redundant
inflection, the verbal noun, which does not exist for all verbs.
This is perhaps more a matter of word derivation than inflection. In
all cases, these inflections have been formed by analysing words
borrowed (or coined) separately. In fact, the -able inflection could
not be described as such in Latin!
Richard.