>
> But I thought OHG had no plurals in <-s>,
No, but PIE did, so they the must have been abolished it at some time.
> 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.
No, but <woordes> vel sim. must have occurred in Dutch and Low German
(certainly in English) among non-native speakers.
> So I don't see the process you describe operating in the case of
> the spread of <-er> with umlaut in German.
The insistence on illogical exception forms like neuter plurals in -er
with umlaut even where they are not warranted is a way to keep the
rabble and foreigners in their place, like insisting on 'fungi' over
'funguses'
In the 1600's, in the Gouden Eeuw, Golden Century in Holland, the word
'arm' had two plurals, 'arms' and 'armen'; after the decline, 'armen'
prevailed. The first form would of course be the one you heard from
non-native Dutch speakers, those who used Dutch as a trade lingua franca.
> 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.
I didn't say Seemannsprache.
I think you need to read up on the history of the Hanse ('scuse my
attitude).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanseatic_League
It is like this:
Northern Germany was the Hanse, and the Hanse was Northern Germany.
The Hanse(atic League) spoke platt (Low German) and Low German was the
language of the Hanse. The Hanse Diets kept their minutes part in
Latin, part in Low German; *never* in High German. If Columbus hadn't
discovered America, moving Europe's center of gravity to the west and
producing Holland's Golden Century, the Hanse would still be powerful
and might have become a separate state, speaking another language than
High German. And Middle Low German was the trade Lingua Franca of the
North Sea and the Baltic, thus it became creolized; it played a
similar role to the development of the grammar and vocabulary of
Danish, Swedish and Norwegian as the one of Northern French to English.
Torsten