--- 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'.)
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'.
Word frequencies change. As I said before, we don't have oxen, and
nowadays rarely talk about lice. Yet 'louse' is one of the more
conservative words in the Swadesh lists.
Richard.