--- In
cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "tegnalos" <tegnalos@...> wrote:
> > > Similarly in hyper-urban French "quatre-z-heures".
> >
> Sorry, but this is wrong, "quatres" does not exist in French.
Numbers
> above 2 do not change in Romance languages (we don't say "cuatros,
> cincos" in Spanish or "quatres, cincs" in French). "Quatre heures"
is
> the only possible form.
Of course.
A hyperurbanism is when a person tries to use a high status
language model he does not master and which leads to mistakes
revealing his faulty erudition. Such things exist in all societies
(like appearing in black shoes and too dark jacket before lunch at
the club).
Green tuxedoed Académiciens, of course, might look upon people
using "quatres" in liaison and writing the same way.
And it is not sanctioned by any grammars I know of.
In dialects in the process of dropping the /h/ misplacing one's h-es
is an often ridiculed hyperurbanism. Cf. Catullus LXXXIV or the
Billy-books I read as a boy, where Billy's somewhat illiterate
father trying to live up to the standard as a suburban petit-
bourgeois is speaking about 'stolen happles', 'oles in the lawn'
and 'ooligan boys arassing the ole harea'.
If authors are correct when giving an initial /h/ where it shouldn't
appear and leaving to the reader to insert a glottal stop instead
of /h/ in the normal language, those speakers are perhaps not as
ridiculous as they seem to a linguist. The other day I suggested
that this might just be a refurnishing of interchangeable phonems.
Lars