Re: [tied] De Vulgari Regularitate (earlier: substratums)

--- In cybalist@..., "richardwordingham" <richard.wordingham@...>
wrote:

> --- In cybalist@..., "tgpedersen" <tgpedersen@...> wrote:
> > For some odd reason, the irregular (and umlauted) nouns in the
> > Scandinavian laguages belong to the same semantic categories as
> those
> > of English (unlike German, where imlauting is a regular process):
> > Farm animals, family and parts of the body.
>
> > They haven't been dooed away with (Piotr can't spell). Maybe it's
> > deeper than that.
>
> I think we hav keept them becaus the pluralz ar evryday wordz.
>
> (And we don't have oxen nowadays, so we aren't tempted to

say 'oxes'.)

And we don't have øksne nowadays, so therefore we say 'okser'.

>
> Actually, it is probably more complicated yet more prosaic. I

think

> it's more a matter of very common nouns, and then nouns that are
> commoner in the plural than in the singular. (English actually has

a

> suppletive plural, 'people', for 'person'.) Sometimes the plural

can

> drive out the singular, so you hear 'dice' for 'die' and I have
> read 'taxa' for 'taxon'.

Danish has no s-plural, so it's "en hotdogs, to hotdogs".

>
> Word frequencies change. As I said before, we don't have oxen, and
> nowadays rarely talk about lice.

That might backfire.

>Yet 'louse' is one of the more
> conservative words in the Swadesh lists.
>
> Richard.

I understand that when you say "we, people, the world" you mean "we
Anglophones, the people of Anglophonia, the English-speaking world"

Torsten