From: dgkilday57
Message: 68972
Date: 2012-03-13
>I would guess that 'arse' undergoes replacement more frequently than 'tail' because it acquires a coarse connotation in polite registers more quickly. It hops dialects quite often as we see with <ass> (in my rhotic dialect and others), Lat. <dossus> (Fr. <dos> etc.) beside <dorsum>, Cast. <nalga> (from Leonese acc. to MCV).
> W dniu 2012-03-13 00:51, dgkilday57 pisze:
>
> > "Law-like influence" is stretching things a bit, and frequency can
> > hardly be the kingpin. I would bet my pants that 'tail' is more frequent
> > than 'woad' with most English-speakers, for example.
>
> The correlation is observable, measurable and highly robust. Of course
> the outcome of a stochastic process is not predictable in individual
> cases and individual exceptions do not falsify a statistical correlation
> (e.g. the replacement of OE hy: by Scandinavian-derived ME they does not
> disprove the general tenacity of personal pronouns).
> It goes without saying that numerous other factors are involved (e.g.,
> if a rare but useful word inhabits a safe "ecological niche" thanks to
> its semantic specialisation, it may survive in it like the tuatara).
>
> By the way, *taGla- and *waiDa- are both common Germanic, with only
> tentative cognates outside the branch; the older word supposedly
> translatable as 'tail' survives as Eng. arse -- also an old and
> respectable meaning, very possibly the original one for this word, if
> Hittite evidence is anything to go by. I wonder why 'tail' is number 35
> on the Swadesh list while 'arse' never made it there.