Re: [tied] Middle English Plurals

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Brian M. Scott" <BMScott@...>
wrote:

> 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.

I was looking for an objection but I didn't find one. Instead there
was a claim that you had understood the situation in Caxton's story
better than I had. The way I see it the wyf did understand, but was
offended by their language, especially the plural -s, which as Piotr
pointed out, was current all over England and which she therefore
must have been able to understand.


BTW, how can a response be a non-sequitur? Are you sure you didn't
mean to say 'irrelevant' or the like?

>
> > 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.
>

I should modify my position here. The competition was not between
generalised plural -s and generalised plural -n, but between
generalised plural -s and the older irregular system, by which
plural -s becomes a bone of contentention, a shibboleth, and
therefore avoided in the conservative dialect (which therefore
changes, without "wanting to").

Torsten