Re: [tied] Middle English Plurals

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Piotr Gasiorowski
<piotr.gasiorowski@...> wrote:

> 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.

An authoritative statement.

Followed by a restatement of the traditional position.

>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.

Yes, I know, the development of English was driven by perfectly
natural processes, unlike the development of creoles. Obviously the
Germans refused to participate in this perfectly natural process to
the point of eventually banishing all -s plurals (apart from
Northernisms and Romance loans). What is the matter with these people?

Torsten