At 10:15:43 PM on Saturday, September 13, 2008, tgpedersen
wrote:
[...]
> But cf. pl. children, Du. kinderen, Germ. Kinder. That
> plural ending which is taken by very few German and even
> fewer Dutch neuters and very few Ferman masc.'s make it an
> old s-stem, I learnt somewhere. In English it's even
> rarer, which makes one wonder if they are cognate somehow,
> the DU./Germ. ones stemming from *g^en- "erzeugen"?
In <children> it's an innovation. OED s.v. <child> (n.):
The OE. plural was normally <cild>; but in late OE. the
word was partly assimilated to the neuter <-os> stems,
making nom. pl. <cildru, -ra>, and esp. gen. pl. <cildra>.
Ælfric, Grammar 23, gives nom. <cild>, gen. <cildra>, dat.
<cildum>; but he also has nom. <cildru> (e.g. Hom. II.
324). No <r> forms occur in the earlier Vesp. Psalter nor
in Northumbrian. The latter had <cild> and <cildo>; and
sometimes made the word masc. with pl. <cildas>. In ME.
there are rare instances of <chyld, childe> as plural; but
the surviving type was OE. <cildru, cildra>, which gave
ME. <childre, childer>: this was the regular northern and
north midland form, and is still used in the dialects as
far south as Shropsh., Leicester, and Lincolnsh. But in
the south this was made <childer-en, childre-n> by
conformation to the <-en> plurals: cf. <brethre>,
<brether>, <brethren>, plurals of BROTHER. This has become
the standard and literary form. The Old Northumbrian
<cildas> is paralleled by <childes> in 15th c., which is
exceptional; but the Sc. differentiated word CHIELD has
always <chields> in plural.
Brian