Re[2]: [tied] Middle English Plurals

At 11:56:14 AM on Wednesday, January 7, 2004, tgpedersen
wrote:

>>> No. The South adopted the unpractical <-en> exactly
>>> _because_ the North adopted the practical <-es>; cf the
>>> reaction of Caxton's woman.

>> Drivel. To the (very limited) extent that it permits any
>> relevant inference at all, the story points in the exact
>> opposite direction: she didn't even recognize the
>> northern form. You can't deliberately react against
>> something of which you're not aware in the first place.
>> The notion of impractical <-en> and practical <-es> is
>> also drivel.

> She certainly recognized enough of it to recognize it as a
> "French" plural, which apparently was the then current
> linguistic idea where this plural came from.

More nonsense. There is no reason to think that her
'frenshe' meant anything more than 'incomprehensibly
foreign'. The idea that the 'goode wyf' even had a
'linguistic idea of where this plural came from' is ...
bizarre. In any case your response is basically a non
sequitur: it fails to address the objection to your original
claim and indeed undermines that claim.

> As for practical <-s>, 1600's Dutch saw a profusion of
> <-plurals>, eg. 'arms', now 'armen'. Poets etc on the
> other hand tried to keep alive unpractical stuff like the
> dat.pl. -n.

Still no justification for the idea that the one is
practical and the other isn't. Proof by blatant assertion
isn't.

Brian