Re: s-stems in Slavic and Germanic

--- On Thu, 2/5/09, tgpedersen <tgpedersen@...> wrote:

> From: tgpedersen <tgpedersen@...>
> Subject: [tied] Re: s-stems in Slavic and Germanic
> To: cybalist@yahoogroups.com
> Date: Thursday, February 5, 2009, 6:00 AM
> >
> > On second thought, you must be talking about
> hypercorrection, I
> > guess:
> > "Don't say <lembir>, say <lamb>
> (etc.)" leads to the belief that if
> > <lamb> is correct, then all words that were the
> same in the plural,
> > like <wort>, must be corrected forms for
> original forms with <-ir>,
> > thus a rebellious folk starts to believe that the
> folksy forms must
> > be forms with <-ir>, so rebelliously they start
> adding <-ir> to all
> > nouns that were identical in the plural. So instead
> of retaining
> > the inherited plural in only a few nouns, they come to
> believe that
> > this was the true inherited plural in many other
> nouns, even though
> > it was not, and therefore adopt it out of a sense of
> purism or
> > desire not to be corrected. Is this more or less what
> you are
> > saying? It sounds so complicated and therefore
> unlikely to me. I
> > prefer my idea of a simple desire to have a distinct
> plural form
> > for neuter nouns (and any nouns that were identical to
> the singular
> > in the plural), so they adopted and dispersed the
> s-stem plural
> > <-ir>. Maybe someone has written a paper that
> addresses this
> > question?
>
> Actually what you describe is similar to what happened in
> Danish,
> among the neuter plurals which were endingless in ON, the
> plural
> ending -e has spread (et hus, to huse, cf Sw. ett hus, två
> hus),
> mostly by back formation from the def. pl. husene, but also
> because
> it's practical. In eg. 'tog' "train"
> the plural -e is spreading, but
> still isn't considered correct, which means that a
> loudspeaker warning
> 'Der kommer tog!' "Train(s) is/are
> coming!" might referring to one or
> several trains. I used to argue with my younger brother
> about it,
> being the correct one (and he is now an engineer by
> profession).
>
> But it was not what I had in mind, I was talking about the
> s-plural of
> the a-stems, the thematic stems, the one that became the
> standard for
> almost all nouns in English and for those words in Dutch
> which are
> bisyllabic, ending in -en, -el, -er, or which are foreign
> (mostly
> French); the ending which has become almost obliterated in
> German,
> with exception of foreign words and 'low' words
> that are marked as
> specifically Northern and part of a see culture (eg. Jungs
> "mates").
>
> Now my idea was that the -s plural in England was felt to
> be a mark of
> the foreigner who spoke bad middle English and messed up
> his
> conjugations, specifically the French, since generalizing
> the standard
> case is what you do when you speak a foreign language
> badly. Thus in
> German, the a-stem s-plural would be so stigmatized by this
> tendency
> that people avoided it, to the point of choosing the
> complicated,
> perceived correct form whenever they were in doubt.
>
> Suppose 'ain't I' for 'aren't I'
> spread in English, some people might
> come up with *'amn't I'. That's the type of
> hypercorrection I'm
> talking about.
>
>
> Torsten

"Ain't I" IS more correct than "aren't I" [sic] --which is a hypercorrection combining a 2nd person verb with a 1st person subject pronoun. Thor should righteously smite you into oblivion for desacrating the One and Only True Tongue.