Re: Think, thank, thunk (was Re: Unicode character pickers)

Paul Bennett skrev:
> On Sat, 18 Mar 2006 07:31:39 -0500, Benct Philip Jonsson
> <bpj@...>  wrote:
>
>> Eudora does AFAIK not support Unicode.
>> That was why I switched(*) to Thunderbird.
>>
>> (*)I must resist that temptation to inflect
>> _switch_ strong: _switch, swatch, swatch_!
>> Does anyone else play that game?
>
>
> Oh, very yes. It's a common part of my wordplay (for want of a better
> term  for that subset of compulsive tics that involve weirding language)
> to form  irregular versions of perfectly regular verbs and nouns. I have
> also been  known to fixate on archaic formations, the most popular being
> |eyren| as  the plural of |egg|, along with |childer| as the plural of
> |child| and  several others. The use of |y-| to form perfects is not
> unknown.
I do this in both Swedish and English.  I also am fond of backformations
like _contage_ (noun as well as verb) rather than _contagion_.
What seems a bit worrying is that it is normally assumed that it is
the regular/simpler patterns that are contagious, especially with
children, but with us glossomaniacs it seems to be the rare, archaic
and "irregular" that is contagious, suggesting that the parts of our
brains that deal with language are *really* differently wired from
normal people.  My favorite theory is that my linguistic functions
reside in the other hemisphere from other people, but that explanation
doesn't hold for people who unlike me didn't suffer post-natal brain
damage.  OTOH I've heard my stepsons, who certainly aren't any
glossomaniacs use strong inflection for standardly and historically
weak Swedish verbs from a young age.

--
/BP 8^)>
--
Benct Philip Jonsson -- melroch at melroch dot se

    "Maybe" is a strange word.  When mum or dad says it
    it means "yes", but when my big brothers say it it
    means "no"!

                            (Philip Jonsson jr, age 7)

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