Re: s-stems in Slavic and Germanic

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Brian M. Scott" <BMScott@...> wrote:

>
> At 12:14:56 PM on Thursday, February 5, 2009, Andrew
> Jarrette wrote:
>
> [...]
>
> > 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.
>
> R. Priebsch & W.E. Collinson, _The German Language_, 3rd
> edn., 1948, p. 204:
>
> There was an Old Saxon plural in <-os> which was retained
> in Low German till the twelfth century, but receded later
> under the influence of High German, and it is not clear
> how far it is the source of the modern plurals. We find a
> recrudescence of <s>-forms in the Netherlands in the
> thirteenth century followed by their reappearance in Low
> German in the fourteenth, first of all in the 'nomina
> agentis' in <-ere>. Then there was a new influx of
> <s>-plurals from French from the seventeenth century
> onward.

Note the weasel word 'recrudescence'. The two gentlemen (a German and
an Anglosaxon I suppose) can't show that the s-plural disappeared in
Dutch which they really really want to do, and the Low German s-plural
in their tale 'receded' and then 'reappeared' (note that they never
commit themselves to stating that it disappeared).

> Hence it is perhaps best to assign them in N.H.G. to a foreign
> origin.

And as I have shown above there is no 'here', so their 'hence' is
vacuous. I am sure it is best (not even 'perhaps') for their gut
feeling about the German language that the s-plural should be foreign,
but it isn't. They themselves are a perfect example of how
shibbolethized the Germanic s-plural has become in German, as it was
in Middle English to Caxton's wyf.

> A more recent treatment might also point to English influence.

Not really. s-plural is not spreading in the German vocabulary, but is
adopted together with the foreign word.


Torsten