Re: [tied] Re: Dissimilation of gW/kWVw to gVw/kVw

On Wed, 27 Apr 2005 09:34:48 -0400, Brian wrote:

>>> On what evidence do you conclude that the Latin inflectional
>>> suffixes are the source of this element?
>
>> It's the consensus, afaIk. They are all colloquialism and
>> pretty recent ('funkis' being perhaps the oldest).
>
>That was my guess when I looked at them, but <skakis> 1902
>is the only one that made it into SAOB.
>
>Brian

What I remember reading, but I forget where, is that the oldest such
words were student slang: students knew Latin, of course, since they
were taught in it, and would sometimes Latinise Swedish words by
adding to them the -is ending of Latin nouns such as civis. Most -is
words are nouns; the adjective skakis 'shaky' is unusual. Kändis
'celeb' is an example of a noun formed from an adjective (känd
'(well-)known').

Kim Bastin