Re: s-stems in Slavic and Germanic

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

>
> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "tgpedersen" <tgpedersen@> wrote:
> >
> > 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).
> >
> Didn't it disappear & then reappear in Dutch? In Oudnederlands the
> plural is formed with various vowels, -on, is in some cases
> unmarked, etc.; to the point: there's an 11c <nestas>, but it's
> considered to be regional.

You mean it's considered by some to be Kentish.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hebban_olla_vogala
Intersting that this is the reverse of Modern Dutch which has plurals
'vogels' and 'nesten'

> Do you have examples to the contrary?

The contrary of what?
Perhaps I should be asking you if you have Old Dutch examples of non-s
plurals in monosyllables? The corpus is very small.

> Sure, Middelnederlands has -s in loanwords and occasionally in
> monosyllables;

http://www.literatuurgeschiedenis.nl/lg/middeleeuwen/tekst/index.html
Alexander der Groote (1260), line 16-17 'twee trouwe ridders'
http://titus.uni-frankfurt.de/texte/etcs/germ/mndl/alexandd/alexa.htm
Brandane (1150, Rhineland!) 'vele wonders'
http://www.literatuurgeschiedenis.nl/lg/middeleeuwen/tekst/lgme008.html

Do your homework next time.

> skipping ahead:

Yes, do let's follow the example of those two gentlemen.

> the continued strong influence of French and the relatively recent
> influence of English seem to be responsible for -s plurals in
> modern Dutch in loanwords.

We were discussing native Dutch words. Don't change the subject.

> Booij and Van Santen (1998: 91) single out 2 types of foreign words
> in Dutch:
> bastaardwoorden and loanwords, the former with a higher degree of
> nativisation and usually taking the -en plural ending. Geerts et al.
> (1984: 61) claim that -s is _assigned_ to nouns with end in a
> consonant and in the donor language also have the -s plural. Whether
> is it re-taken by loanwords or borrowed together with the foreign
> word remains undecided. Gerritsen (1986: 62) claims that "borrowed
> nouns mostly do not follow rules that determine whether a Dutch
> word has an -s or an -(e)n plural, but are restricted to -s, with
> some exceptions which use both options." (A study of c. 200 recent
> borrowings from English into Dutch shows that in 90% of cases the
> -s plural is assigned.)

Apart from that: it is interesting that the group of native words in
Dutch which has retained the plural -s since the 17th century during
the (re-)onslaught of the -en plural, namely the bisyllabics in -em,
-en, -el, -er are those which have no special plural form in German,
which means they could need a separate plural in practical situations
(and that's exactly where Platt (Low German) uses the s-plural too).

As for Old Dutch, the corpus is so small that I suspect that the
vogala is the only example we have of a plural of a bisyllabic in -el.
On that meagre evidence we might even conclude that the plural -s was
a foreign thing in Germanic languages other than English, coming from
Northern French. But it doesn't change my main argument that the
advance of the -s plural was a process of creolization. Furthermore
the creolization process had started in French with the collapse of
the old system
nom.sg. -s, obl.sg. zero
nom.pl. zero, obl.pl. -s
into
sg. zero, pl. -s
which made the -s a mark of nothing but plural. Caxton's wyf certainly
identifies this s-plural as Frenche, as she goes all Brian over this
affront to her native language.

BTW:
http://www.dutchlanguage.info/dutch/history.asp
'William Caxton (c.1422-1491) wrote in his Prologue to his Aeneids in
1490 that an old English text was more like to Dutche than English.'


Torsten