Re: Word connections - malaise and sit

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.