Re: Middle English Plurals

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

> 08-01-04 12:44, tgpedersen wrote:
>
> > Yes, yes. And still you offer no analogy to selection pressure in
> > your model, and I do. Therefore my theory is more expressive and
> > should be preferred over yours.
>
> Not in this case, at any rate, since you haven't demonstrated why <-

es>

> should have been "fitter" than <-en> as a plural marker. Perhaps it

was,

> but I'd love to see just why.

It isn't. It's the language with generalised plural <-s> that's
fitter than its opposite, a conservative, complication-preserving, s-
shunning and _as a consequence_ of that n-loving language. Cf. the
succes of English vs. the failure of German as a world language
(apart from ideology, of course).

>But assuming that they were equally fit
> (in purely functional terms), the initially greater frequency of <-

es>

> (among the 200 most frequent OE nouns about 30% were strong

masculines

> with plurals in <-as>, while only about 10% were weak nouns with

plurals

> in <-an>) accounts for its later success without any extra

assumptions.

> Loanwords from Old Norse and French may have helped <-es> to

expand, not

> because French also had an s-plural (incidentally, in the 15th

century

> the process of dropping /-s/ in French was well under way), but

because

> borrowed nouns normally tend to join the most productive

declension, so

> their absorption significantly increased the proportion of -es-

plurals

> in English.
>

Nice example, but rendered invalid by the example of High German,
which took the opposite (yes, not just different) path, to the point
of abolishing plural -s after <-en>, <-el>, <-er> (Dutch and Low
German kept it), making the ones of those plurals that are not
umlauted unpractically homophonous with the singular. English is not
the only modern Germanic language, you know. BTW I think I read that
Yiddish, in spite of being otherwise very little influenced by Low
German, uses s-plurals.

Torsten