06-01-04 13:41, tgpedersen wrote:
> Which is my whole point. So: in what way does the spread of plural -s
> in Middle English, supposedly not a creole phenomenon, differ from
> the spread of, say, stem or infinitive forms in the present tense of
> Afrikaans verbs, argued by some to be a creole phenomenon?
Neither is a creole phenomenon. ME -es < OE -as < PGmc. *-o:s(ez), the
inherited nom.pl. of strong masculines was the most productive plural
suffix already in Old English (and also before OE). Its lexical
expansion was a perfectly natural process that didn't require external
motivation. "The rich get richer and the poor get poorer" -- that is, a
productive plural pattern attracts nouns from other declensions and
becomes even more productive; recessive patterns may linger on for a
long time but what eventually remains is a handful of irregular forms.
The strong feminine ending (OE -e ~ -a) and the strong neuter ending (OE
-u/zero) were soon reduced to nothing (the zero ending survives in
<sheep> and <deer>). The only significant competition was from <-en>
(historically, the nom.pl. of weak nous), which enjoyed a brief period
of increased productivity in the South and in the SW Midlands (<honden>
'hands', <dehtren> 'daughters', etc.); but even there the position of
<-es> remained strong, and it became definitely dominant everywhere in
England before 1400.