Re: s-stems in Slavic and Germanic

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "tgpedersen" <tgpedersen@...> wrote:

>
>
> 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

But I thought OHG had no plurals in <-s>, and especially not in neuter
nouns. I don't think the Germans would have felt obliged to avoid
*<Worts> or *<Wortes> as the plural of <Wort> because I don't think
that form ever existed. So I don't see the process you describe
operating in the case of the spread of <-er> with umlaut in German.

I don't know where German did get its few noun plurals in <-s>, maybe
it's from the Seemannsprache you have mentioned, or from
Mittelniederdeutsch, or perhaps French, since it seems to be commonest
among words of foreign origin.

Andrew