Re: Regularized Inglish

John Cowan wrote:
>
> 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.
>
        It's always difficult to know when a feature is due to borrowing or to
a common origin. I should ask my new Hindi housemate. If the same
feature appears in Hindi, it would be a good proof that it's an
Indo-European feature :) .

> 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....
>
        Strange... How did they make their ordinal numbers before this
"borrowing", does anyone know?

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

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