Re: Shibbolethisation

> ----- Original Message -----
> From: tgpedersen@...
> To: cybalist@...
> Sent: Tuesday, March 06, 2001 2:19 PM
> Subject: Odp: [tied] Re: Shibbolethisation
>
>
> ...In the North there were Anglo-Saxon and Scandinavian villages.

The

> standard theory says English (pre-Conquest?)

I can't believe I actually said that. Pre-Conquest Hanse! I'm trying
to straighten my toes with a hammer. Of course it's post- !

arose from a mixture of

> their respective languages. But when and where do villagers of
> different villages meet, if at all? On the market. What do they do
> there? Buy and sell. From and to whom? The representatives of the
> Hanse; this was the only area where the Hanse dealt directly with

the

> producers. Now there's a good reason for creolization; note also

the

> Dutch and Plattdeutsch (or "Hansa-talk"!) predilection for s-

plurals.

> Is this perhaps where mr. Mercer's -s plurals came from?

--- In cybalist@..., "Piotr Gasiorowski" <gpiotr@...> wrote:
> -es plurals (OE -as) were simply generalised from the strong
masculine declension (sta:n, sta:nas, wulf, wulfas, etc.). In Middle
English this pattern became more productive than any alternative
plural formation, though the weak plural in -en (OE -an) offered a
little resistance and enjoyed a good deal of popularity in some ME
dialects. The popularity of -es is at least partly due to its
phonological transparency (most other noun inflections were reduced
to schwa or zero in ME).
>
> Piotr
>
Yes, I know, that is the standard explanation, or rather account of
what happened. The question is: for what? did it happen because
England was a trading nation?
In Dutch today you have a similar situation to the one you are
describing for Middle English: much -(e)s plural, and a good of
-(e)n plural surviving, and a language practice where pronouncing
final -n becomes optional. This means that much of the inflectional
sytem we know from German has collapsed and merged (since you can no
longer distinguish between final -e and final -en).
But suppose you're in Germany and you want to say something and you
forgot if the inflected word ends in -e or -en. What do you do? You
mumble. Do that often enough without being jumped by the natives for
ruining their language (which is exactly what they would refrain from
if they are more interested in pushing their merchandise across the
counter) and you have a language in which the endings wither away. As
in English. So is this the reason for the prevailing -s plural?

Torsten