Re: s-stems in Slavic and Germanic

--- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "Andrew Jarrette" <anjarrette@...> wrote:

>
> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, "tgpedersen" <tgpedersen@> wrote:
> >
> > ---
> > > OK I get what you're saying, but remember OHG extended neuter
> > > plurals in <-ir> (e.g. <hu:sir>) long before the Hansa and its
> > > period of widespread trade. I doubt that it developed
> > > primarily as a reaction to foreigners and the rabble.
> >
> > That's where I have to draw on conclusions that seem to be
> > entirely my own only at least for the time being: Proto-Germanic,
> > which was one of many para-Germanic dialects spread through what
> > then became Germania with the campaign of Ariovistus in the mid
> > first century BCE from Southern Poland and Silesia. According to
> > what I read I believe in some article by Kuhn, but now I can't
> > find it, in the earliest sources the rabble in Northern Germania
> > were called laeti (that would be the people of the NWBlock area,
> > of the Harpstedt-Nienburg culture
> > http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harpstedt-Nienburger_Gruppe
> > those of the south, the defeated Celts or para-Celts were called
> > *skalk- vel sim. But as you know, words in Germanic in p- are
> > substrate, many of those words are concentrated in especially
> > Northwestern Germany and Holland, but most of those words exist in
> > Standard, ie. Southern German too (but with pf-). That means that
> > whoever brought Germanic speech to Southern Germany must have
> > included a large contingent of original NWB-speakers, which means
> > the social factors which eradicated the 'practical' s-plural were
> > active there too.
>
> You talk as though you've discussed this topic before, and probably
> you have,

Mostly wíth myself ;-)

> but I only know about this issue, as you have discussed it, as it
> regards Caxton's observation about the "wyf" who called eggs
> "eyren". So I don't really know exactly what you're talking
> about when you say "the social factors which eradicated the
> 'practical' s-plural".

It's sort of a philosphy I have about the sociology of language: there
are two camps in every linguistic community: those that try hard to
preserve language as it is, they are lawsayers, poets, in general
people in power, who want rules to apply in social life, and those who
don't care, they are mostly traders who deal with people from many
different communities with no further interest in them other than that
they should trade fairly. The latter will tend to creolize the
language, they have no regard for funny rules, as far as they are
concerned, one eg. plural ending for their language is good enough.
The former will associate the looseness of the language of the latter
with the disruption they feel those traders are causing in the ordered
society (since trade is to the gift-based society, what prostitution
is to marriage, the dissolution of all bands and their replacement
with a single one, that of money, as Marx (appr.) put it). The rest of
the people will tend to go with the flow, ie. follow the one of the
two philosophies which seems most successful under their given
circumstances. Now since trade is dependent on transport lanes (ship
lanes, roads etc), and the North Sea, Atlantic and the Rhine provided
that much better than the miserable roads in Southern Germany, the
trade philosophy prevailed in those northern areas, but the
law-and-order one in Southern Germany.

> In High German-speaking areas there were no s-plurals to speak of;

But there must have been s-plurals in Proto-Germanic, since a-stem
nom.pl. has -s in ON (> -z > -r) and Gothic, so it must have been
abolished (or rather, acc.pl. substituted for it, as nom.pl. was
substituted for acc.pl. in OE) some time between PGmc. and OHG.

> in Low German and Dutch-speaking areas, I don't really get
> your idea of a shibboleth.

That one I didn't get.

> I don't really believe that foreigners would have that much
> influence on native grammar.

I take it you think different now.

> And if it was due to creolization: since in this area Low German,
> Dutch, and English were all of common origin, wouldn't they at
> least originally have the <-s> plural in the same nouns, and the
> <-en> plural in the same nouns? I.e. it wouldn't be a favorable
> environment for foreign influence to cause a change, since the
> foreigners' language was so similar?

That's a good objection. Actually when Scandinavians try to
communicate in their own languages, they don't generalize grammatical
categories, eg substitute a general plural for the several that exist
in the separate languages. The way I see it is this: Germanic was
creolized during its expansion west by the NWBlock language. Example:
In Dutch, NWGerman (Western Platt) and Scandinavian there is a
tendency to reduce the three gender system to a two gender system
consisting of common gender (from the merger of m. and f.) and neuter
gender. This is an odd system in IE, it is known otherwise only from
Hittite. Further, both English and Scandinavian has 3sg -s (Scand. -r)
supposedly taken from the 2sg, again an odd system, otherwise found
only in Tokharian. This makes me suspect that the IE dialect which as
a substrate caused these changes in NWEurope was a very conservative
IE dialect, one that branched off early from the main IE stem. The
speakers of that language would thus have had no clue from their
native language what kind of plural a Germanic noun should have and
would therefore have preferred the s-plural, wherever feasible, but
the gender of a noun, which is a much more historically stable thing,
they would have been able to infer from cognates in their own
two-gender language. The fact that English has no gender at all I
would put down to French influence.

> This is all weak reasoning, it's becuase I find the concept of
> creolization and shibboleth causing the loss of <-s> plurals
> difficult to understand. The process is not clear to me from what
> you have said.

Try asking.


Torsten