> But now I'm all confused over the idea of "idiom"
Here's
one definition, from the Oxford English Dictionary: "3. a. A
form of
expression, grammatical construction, phrase, etc., peculiar
to a language;
a peculiarity of phraseology approved by the usage of a
language, and often
having a signification other than its grammatical
or logical
one."
Not sure whether that helps; it's not really an absolute term,
at
least not when used in this way...
> How often do words have
such different senses when they are pleural
> compaired to singular? I
tend to categorize those types of shifts as
> idomatic... but if it's
really commmon/regular I guess it wouldn't
> be...
I suppose
these could be called idiomatic, since they depart from the
norm shared by
English and Old Norse for the meaning of the plural to
be predictable from
the singular, and do so in ways that are usually
pecular to Old Norse. Or
you could sidestep the whole 'idiom'
question and just regard them as pairs
of separate words, one of which
just happened to have historically been the
plural of the other. A
couple more that come to mind:
lag, neuter
sg. layer, fellowship, tune, etc.
lög, pl. law, laws.
lát, neuter
sg. loss, death.
lát, pl. manners.
Similarly we have a few words in
English where the meanings of what
were once plural and singuar of the same
word have diverged, e.g.
'mean' : 'means'; 'air' : 'airs' (as in "to give
oneself airs"); and
for some speakers 'medium' : 'media'.
There are
also quite a few 'pluralia tantum' in Old Norse, words which
only occur as
grammatical plurals, some corresponding to singular
nouns in English, e.g.
'jól', neuter plural "yule". Obviously
language is a quirky thing, but it's
only when we start to compare
languages that we realise just how
quirky!
Hope that hasn't added too much to the
confusion...