Re: CHAT: Worse Greek 102 (was: Bad Latin 101)

At 5:07 pm -0500 2/2/01, Padraic Brown wrote:
>On Fri, 2 Feb 2001, Raymond Brown wrote:
>>Actually it [uirus] is an o-stem.  It's one of the few _neuters_ which, like
>>_uulgus_ (multitude, the people) and _pelagus_ (sea), have their nominative
>>& accusatives in -us.  The genitive is _uiri_ and the dative & ablative are
>>_uiro_.
>
>Do you know if there is any relationship between these particular
>words and the -s stem neuters? I.e., possible declensional migration?
Only in the case of _pelagus_ and not in the way that you mean; _pelagus_
is not much used till after the Augustan period; it is a borrowing from the
Greek _pelagos_ which was an -s stem neuter. But in Greek, intervocalic -s-
simply disappeared (it probably became [h] on the way; cf. Gaelic soft
mutation of {s} as {sh} pronounced [h]).  So the Greek genitive is
_pelageos_, normally contracted to _pelagous_ /pelagu:s/, and the dative is
_pelagei_ (originally four syllables /pelagei/ but contracted at first to
/pelage:/ which, by the Hellenistic period, had become /pelagi:/.

The word was generally simply given the same treatment as _uirus_ and
_uulgus_; Lucretius uses the nom/acc Greek plural _pelage:_.  But the word
is normally a 'mass noun' in Latin, meaning "the sea"(as opposed to land),
"a great mass of water".

_uirus_ is cognate with the Greek _(w)ios_ (poison, venom, rust, verdegris)
from <-- *wiso- (from which also the Latin is derived); the Greek is a
regular 2nd declension masculine.

_uulgus_ was treated as masculine by some early authors but settles down to
neuter gender in the Classical language.  It too is a mass noun, meaning
"the people"; it was not used to mean 'a people', 'a nation' as populus was.

It would seem to be a case of these mass nouns becoming neuter.  Possibly
the existence of 3rd decl. neuters in -us helped to accomodate the nom. &
acc. retaining the -us ending.

Of course in Vulgar Latin it is quite clear that there was a drift of
commonly used 3rd neuters to the second declension, e.g.

LATIN      FRENCH  SPANISH   PORT.   ITALIAN   ROMANIAN
tempus,     temps   tiempo   tempo    tempo     tempu
temporis

corpus,     corps   cuerpo   corpo    corpo     ??
corporis

Fraid I don't know the Romanian for "body".  Only French retains a memory
of the Latin -us neuter.  But this Vulgar Latin development was also bound
up with the VL 'masculinization' of neuters, so is quite contrary to the
Classical development of _uirus_ and _uulgus_.

Ray.



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