Re: Regularized Inglish

Christophe Grandsire scripsit:

>         Really? So it must be more than a simple borrowing. An Indo-European
> feature maybe? Or a contact phenomenon between French and its neighbour
> languages? It would be interesting to know from where the original use
> came from.
http://www.m-w.com claims that the connection is semantic: "flour"/"flower"/
"fleur" originally had the sense "best part, usable part", and that
the duality of sense goes back to Latin at least.

Furthermore, "bloom"/"Blum"/"bloem" is actually a cognate of "flor-em",
so the duality may in fact be very old.  But it could just as well be
a Germanic imitation of Latin habits.

The best example of *that* is the suffix "-st" in large German
ordinal numbers, which looks like a superlative:

        fleissig : fleissigste :: dreissig : dreissigste
        industrious : most industrious :: thirty :: "thirtyest" (really 30th)

The story here, apparently, is that the large Latin ordinals ended
in "-esimus", as VICESIMUS "20th", TRIGESIMUS "30th".  On their
way to "vingtieme, trentieme", they passed through a stage where
the ending was "-esme".  This looked exactly like the ending of
inherited superlatives in "-ISSIMUS" at the time.

So the German bumpkins apparently got the idea that the clever
sophisticated *Walha* made large ordinaly by saying "twentiest",
"thirtiest", so they did too....

--
John Cowan                                   cowan@ccil.org
       I am a member of a civilization. --David Brin