Re: [tied] Middle English Plurals

From: tgpedersen
Message: 29230
Date: 2004-01-08

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Piotr Gasiorowski
<piotr.gasiorowski@...> wrote:
> 07-01-04 14:52, tgpedersen wrote:
>
> > I offer something by way of explanation. You offer nothing of the
> > kind, except the intervention of an autonomous agent, The Rule,
like
> > a Deus ex machina.
>
> There may be no simple explanation when stochastic processes are
> involved. If you throw a dice and get a five in the first roll,
it's
> little use asking "why a five"? You can be reasonably sure that if
you
> throw the dice 120 times, you'll get about 20 fives, give or take a
> couple, and that there'll be no sevens or eights, but you can't
predict
> the result of the next roll with an expectation of success greater
than
> 0.166....


Thank you for explaining stochastic processes to me. Next comes your
proof that that's what linguistic processes are.


>
> > No. The South adopted the unpractical <-en> exactly _because_ the
> > North adopted the practical <-es>; cf the reaction of Caxton's
woman.
>
> Nonsense. By the time Caxton was telling the story, <-es> was the
only
> productive plural in the South as well as the North. <eyren> was an
> isolated Kentish dialecticism. What puzzled "the good wife" was A
SINGLE
> FORM (<eyren> as opposed to <egges>), not a systemic contrast (<-
en> as
> opposed to <-es>) -- it wasn't the plural suffix that was
unfamiliar to
> her, but the whole word <egges>.

If that were the case, there would no point in Caxton telling the
story.


>While we're at it, <-en> and <-es> were
> both equally practical as plural markers; they were like two
alleles of
> a similar adaptive value, competing for survival. Such a situation
is
> inherently unstable and one of the alleles is bound to spread at
the
> expense of the other, sooner or later. <-en> might have won, but
the
> initially greater frequency of <-es> probably decided the otcome.
Even
> at the time when <-en> enjoyed its heyday in the South, the
original
> strong masculines (probably the largest declension) on the whole
kept
> their plural <-es>, and the ending was also spreading to original
neuter
> plurals, where the inherited ending was zero (or schwa). The
expansion
> of <-en> affected more typically OE minor declensions (hence the
> surviving forms <brethren> and <children>.

In Dutch there survives a small group of neuters with plural in <-
eren>, eg. <kind>, <kinderen>; <ei>, <eieren>. It is the <-eren>
plural the wyf is expecting; most likely she was using several <-en>
plurals too.

>In other words, they BOTH
> expanded in the same dialect at the expense of the rarer types.
>
>
> > Allright, partial creolisation, then.
>
> Creolisation of a single subsystem, leaving other, even more
complex
> subsystems unaffected? Why was it just the case system that was
simplified?

There's always a counterstream by druids, poets, intellectuals,
lawspeakers to preserve complication. Sometimetimes they win,
sometimes only partially.


>
> > "Natural", in your terms, doesn't seem to mean much.
>
> > "Random evolutionary drift"? Perhaps you should run your
definition
> > of terms past Darwin first? Or else, if you persist in your
metaphor,
> > you should offer an explanation of how "survival of the fittest"
> > enters into your picture of linguistic change.
>
> It isn't just a metaphor. Whenever you have things that replicate
and
> compete for limited resources, similar principles will apply. But
the
> neo-Darwinian model of evolution is not all about the survival of
the
> fittest. Genetic drift is an important factor in it, since most
> mutations are now known to be selectively neutral.
>

And exactly what does that mean? "Survival of the fittest" has been
abolished?

Torsten