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Re: Word connections - malaise and sit

From:Andreas Johansson <and_yo@...>
Date:Saturday, May 26, 2001, 20:24
Nik Taylor wrote:
> > Now you should really watch > > what (or whom) you refer to as being 'nice'. > >Whenever someone claims that the original meaning of a word is the >"correct" meaning, I like to say that that is a very nice thing to say. >;-)
What to do when the word with a changed meaning have acquired endings that're incompatible with the original one? Here's my favourite example; _dator_, pl _datorer_, is the normal Swedish word for "computer". It all began with the Latin plural _data_, in the sense "several bits of information". From this was formed the extremely unwieldy compound _databehandlingsmaskin_ "machine for handling data" which quickly contracted to _datamaskin_ and further to simply _data_. This was pluralized as _dator_, following the pattern of native nouns ending in -a, but this looks rather like latinate agental formation, and was soon reinterpreted as a singular, from which the perfectly regular plural _datorer_ was formed. So, the innocent-looking word _datorer_ actually have THREE plural markers tucked onto it compared to the ancestral Latin singular _datum_. So the word "should" mean somthing like "sets of sets of pieces of information" ... Andreas _________________________________________________________________________ Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com.