Re: [tied] Middle English Plurals

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

> 07-01-04 14:52, tgpedersen wrote:
>
> > I offer something by way of explanation. You offer nothing of the
> > kind, except the intervention of an autonomous agent, The Rule,

like

> > a Deus ex machina.
>
> There may be no simple explanation when stochastic processes are
> involved. If you throw a dice and get a five in the first roll,

it's

> little use asking "why a five"? You can be reasonably sure that if

you

> throw the dice 120 times, you'll get about 20 fives, give or take a
> couple, and that there'll be no sevens or eights, but you can't

predict

> the result of the next roll with an expectation of success greater

than

> 0.166....

Thank you for explaining stochastic processes to me. Next comes your
proof that that's what linguistic processes are.

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

woman.

>
> Nonsense. By the time Caxton was telling the story, <-es> was the

only

> productive plural in the South as well as the North. <eyren> was an
> isolated Kentish dialecticism. What puzzled "the good wife" was A

SINGLE

> FORM (<eyren> as opposed to <egges>), not a systemic contrast (<-

en> as

> opposed to <-es>) -- it wasn't the plural suffix that was

unfamiliar to

> her, but the whole word <egges>.

If that were the case, there would no point in Caxton telling the
story.

>While we're at it, <-en> and <-es> were
> both equally practical as plural markers; they were like two

alleles of

> a similar adaptive value, competing for survival. Such a situation

is

> inherently unstable and one of the alleles is bound to spread at

the

> expense of the other, sooner or later. <-en> might have won, but

the

> initially greater frequency of <-es> probably decided the otcome.

Even

> at the time when <-en> enjoyed its heyday in the South, the

original

> strong masculines (probably the largest declension) on the whole

kept

> their plural <-es>, and the ending was also spreading to original

neuter

> plurals, where the inherited ending was zero (or schwa). The

expansion

> of <-en> affected more typically OE minor declensions (hence the
> surviving forms <brethren> and <children>.

In Dutch there survives a small group of neuters with plural in <-
eren>, eg. <kind>, <kinderen>; <ei>, <eieren>. It is the <-eren>
plural the wyf is expecting; most likely she was using several <-en>
plurals too.

>In other words, they BOTH
> expanded in the same dialect at the expense of the rarer types.
>
>
> > Allright, partial creolisation, then.
>
> Creolisation of a single subsystem, leaving other, even more

complex

> subsystems unaffected? Why was it just the case system that was

simplified?

There's always a counterstream by druids, poets, intellectuals,
lawspeakers to preserve complication. Sometimetimes they win,
sometimes only partially.

>
> > "Natural", in your terms, doesn't seem to mean much.
>
> > "Random evolutionary drift"? Perhaps you should run your

definition

> > of terms past Darwin first? Or else, if you persist in your

metaphor,

> > you should offer an explanation of how "survival of the fittest"
> > enters into your picture of linguistic change.
>
> It isn't just a metaphor. Whenever you have things that replicate

and

> compete for limited resources, similar principles will apply. But

the

> neo-Darwinian model of evolution is not all about the survival of

the

> fittest. Genetic drift is an important factor in it, since most
> mutations are now known to be selectively neutral.
>

And exactly what does that mean? "Survival of the fittest" has been
abolished?

Torsten