From: Arnaud Fournet
Message: 61890
Date: 2008-12-05
----- Original Message -----
From: "Piotr Gasiorowski" <gpiotr@...>
>
> On 2008-12-05 19:54, Arnaud Fournet wrote:
>
>> Good joke, M. Gasiorowski.
>
> It was intended as a joke.
>
=======
Nice,
I somehow read it as a kind of provocation, not a serious analysis.
With more practice, I might be able to read your mind !
A.
>> As far as I can see, all words are inherited or made with inherited
>> morphemes.
>
> Nearly all.
=====
Which is not inherited ?
Why this restriction ?
A.
> But don't confuse morphological changes (such as adding
> affixes to a word) with phonetic ones. A new derivative is a _new word_,
> even if the morphemes are old. If you compare any French word to its
> Latin prototype or any English word to its early Germanic ancestor, in
> the vast majority of cases they will prove to have become _much_
> abbreviated. PGmc. *xauBuðan and *kuninGaz (3 syllables each) became OE
> he:afod and cyning (disyllabic) and these have been further shortened to
> Mod.E head and king. Most of the surviving compounds formed in OE have
> become similarly contracted (hla:f-weard > lord) or at least obscured,
> losing some segments in the process (go:s-hafoc > goshawk).
>
> Piotr
>
=======
This sounds a little bit spurious to me.
For example, considering the fact that j(e) is a bound form in modern French
is it a new word when compared to LAtin ego, which was a free form ?
Is this a phonetic or a morphological change ?
And what about l'outre "otter" > la loutre ?
is loutre a new word when compared to outre ?
Russian gorod from grad is one syllable longer, is it a new word ?
This is a counter-example to phonetic changes implying shorter forms, is it
not ?
I'm not sure the line between phonetics and morphology is so much clear-cut.
A.