I think the below is due to the many foreign
languages that have been constantly introduced to
the various inhabitants of the British isles at
different times. Putting certain endings on words
works better if all the words in the language
have the general "sound" of the language. If you
are always pulling in words with the sound of
other languages it gets very tedious to slap your
native endings on the words, so after a certain
saturation of foreign words the endings
eventually drop from use entirely.

--- keth@... wrote:

> regard
> to the English language, I once read a very
> interesting
> book called "the miracle of language" (author,
> L.. something)
> where it is explained how English represents
> the "avant-garde"
> of a certain development that has affected many
> Germanic languages
> to a varying degree; and that is that the
> meanings that were previously
> conveyed by means of word-endings (inflections
> and declinations)
> are now being conveyed by the order of the
> words.

In English only the -s/-es has remained because
this is a fairly easy ending to tack on any word
of any language (it remains as the noun plural
and genetive case (usu called possessive in
English), the 3rd person sing. verb conjugation
and the ). There's a apostophe convention that is
officially used when the -s represents both
possessive and plural but nobody ever uses it...
(ie not any single English speaker's habit but
should be all English speakers' habit (see?)).

In German, and I imagine in Icelandic as well,
there is some "tension" in how one uses foreign
words. In German almost all endings are on
adjectives, so when they pull in foreign
adjectives their official solution is to simply
"waive" the endings for these paricular foreign
words - but the language is so ending oriented
that Germans are uncomfortable and the slang
usually borrows an "n" to put on the end of the
stem so as to add the ending that "sounds" right.


So "rosa" (pink) should always be "rosa". So "the
pink flower" should be "die rosa Blume" but
everybody *says* "die rosane Blume" (stress
remaining on the first syllable of rosane.

I imagine the same tension would be present in
Icelandic not only with reference to foreign
adjectives but even nouns.

From what I've read on this list, the solution
for Norse would appear to be simply not to use
foreign words - use only those words that
actually occurred in Norse. But of course if
there are actually examples in the old texts of
foreign words for which Norse endings were
awkward, the one is tempted to use whatever
solution the Norse applied in these cases to
foreign words in general.

Rather, the solution would appear to be not to
write Old Norse at all with the exception of
learning purposes - that one has no business
using knowledge of a dead language other than to
read the works written in that language when it
was still alive.





=====
Kindest Regards,
- DeepStream
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