On 2009-06-07 07:34, Brian M. Scott wrote:
> <Ramps>, <ramp>, and <ram> are variant developments of OE
> <hramsa> 'onion, garlic'; in Great Britain they refer to
> Allium ursinum (wild garlic, bear's garlic), in the U.S. to
> Allium tricoccum (wild leek). The OED says that <ramps> is
> regional on both sides of the Pond: northern, Scottish, and
> Irish on the Right, east Midland and southeastern on the
> Left. <Ramsons>, from the same source, seems to be a
> current, non-dialect term for the Allium ursinum.
During the recent Copenhagen conference I found, to my delight, that the
Danes still ate ramsons (ramsløg) (it used to be important in Polish
folk medicine -- I know that from my grandmother, now in her 90s).
Handbook of the history of English should quote the word as an
interesting surviving example of a weak-noun plural in OE -an reanalysed
as a singular, which in turn makes <ramsons> a nice example of a
historically double plural, like <kine> or <children>. Had it developed
regularly, we would have something like sg. <rams>, pl. <ramsen> today.
It's clear that some dialects have reanalysed <rams> as pl. <ram#s> and
back-formed sg. <ram> (like <pea, peas> replacing <peas, peasen>), which
makes it an interesting example of... etc.
A very singular collection of plurals for one and the same plant.
Piotr