Re: [tied] Re: Middle English Plurals

From: Piotr Gasiorowski
Message: 29238
Date: 2004-01-08

08-01-04 12:44, tgpedersen wrote:

> Yes, yes. And still you offer no analogy to selection pressure in
> your model, and I do. Therefore my theory is more expressive and
> should be preferred over yours.

Not in this case, at any rate, since you haven't demonstrated why <-es>
should have been "fitter" than <-en> as a plural marker. Perhaps it was,
but I'd love to see just why. But assuming that they were equally fit
(in purely functional terms), the initially greater frequency of <-es>
(among the 200 most frequent OE nouns about 30% were strong masculines
with plurals in <-as>, while only about 10% were weak nouns with plurals
in <-an>) accounts for its later success without any extra assumptions.
Loanwords from Old Norse and French may have helped <-es> to expand, not
because French also had an s-plural (incidentally, in the 15th century
the process of dropping /-s/ in French was well under way), but because
borrowed nouns normally tend to join the most productive declension, so
their absorption significantly increased the proportion of -es-plurals
in English.

Piotr