Re: English Changes or what into Conlangs
| From: | Raymond Brown <ray.brown@...> |
|---|
| Date: | Sunday, December 5, 1999, 10:47 |
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At 12:46 pm -0800 4/12/99, Sally Caves wrote:
[...]
>
>Well Ray, an -s plural did exist in Old English.
Well aware of that :)
But Mike wanted to know why -s prevailed over most of the other forms.
[....]
>Which leads me to wonder: what is the status of the "s" plural
>in Indo-European nouns and in Latin? Where did the Old French speakers
>get
>it, and why did it become standard there as well?
They got it from Latin. It became standard because there was nothing else.
>Looking at my extremely dusty Latin grammar, I note that you have s
>plurals
>in the accusative case in all the declensions, and in nominative and
>accusative
>in *some* declensions. Did this influence development of s ending in
>French?
Right. Latin grammars give only a partial guide. The Romancelangs are
derived from colloquial Latin which got written only in graffiti and is,
therefore, poorly documented. Nor was it it standardized. It can be
inferred from working back, so to speak, from Romance forms, from
corrections given by grammarians in ancient texts, glosses etc, and from
graffiti.
But it is clear that:
- colloquial Latin had only 3 declensions, the Classical 1st, 2nd & 3rd.
The 4th declension simply got absorbed into the 2nd & the 5th generally
joined the 1st (cf. 'dies' --> Spanish: 'dia' "day"), but some were
remodelled, e.g. spes "hope" was remodelled as a 3rd declension: spes,
speris.
- the neuters for the most part became masculines; sometimes the plural
became a feminine singular, e.g. 'folium' "leaf" gives French '(la)
feuille' <-- folia. But some neuters held out in some dialects; there are
vestiges of the neuter gender in Italian & Romanian, and among Iberian
demonstrative pronouns.
- the case system was drastically simplified. The vocative & locative is
vestigial even in Classical Latin and had gone from the spoken language.
It is also pretty clear that the ablative & acc. singulars had fallen
together in the spoken language as early as the Classical period. The
ablative was an early casualty. Under the empire the spoken language came
to rely more and more on prepositions to indicated possession & indirect
object so that, apart from pronouns, the genitives and datives had
disappeared from spoken Latin.
- the nominative plural of the first declension had long been -as. The
final -e of modern Romanian & Italian is not derived from Latin -ae, but
from -as thus, e.g. plural of 'amica' is 'amiche' /a'mike/ in Italian, not
*amice, whereas the masc. has 'amico' ~ 'amici' /a'mitSi/ <-- Lat. amici).
The final -s in the protoRomance of these areas gave way to a palatal sound.
>
> puella/puella, but puellam/puellas.
> vir/viri, but virum/viros.
> lex/leges, and legem/leges.
> imber/imbres and imbrem/imbres.
>
>Curious.
Classical forms. Final -m had become silent before the end of the BC
period (which means that the 1st dec. did not distinguish separate
nominative & accusative forms). In colloqial Latin the nominative sing. of
3rd declensions was remodelled on the analogy of the other cases, so that
all the peculiar forms given in Latin grammars got level out.
Also colloquial Latin the older quantitative vowel distinctions of
Classical Latin, gave way to qualitative differences and we find that, e.g.
/u:/ --> /u/, /u/ & /o:/ both colalesce to /o/, and /o/ --> /O/ [Note:
phonemic, not phonetic notation!]. So that the forms in colloguial Latin/
protoRomance were (to use nouns that survived):
1st declension:
SINGULAR PLURAL
NOM./ACC. porta portas
2nd declension:
SINGULAR PLURAL
NOM. muros muri
ACC. muro muros
3rd declension:
SINGULAR PLURAL
NOM. flores flores
ACC. flore flores
In Old French they are:
1st declension:
SINGULAR PLURAL
NOM./ACC. porte portes
2nd declension:
SINGULAR PLURAL
NOM. murs mur
ACC. mur murs
3rd declension:
SINGULAR PLURAL
NOM. flors flors
ACC. flor flors
[I *know* this is not the full story - quite a few of the 3rd declension
'imparisyllabics' kept distinct nominative forms and resisted to the trend
towards re-modelling]
Feminine 3rd declension forms tended to lose the nominative sing. -s from
13th cent onwards, i.e. join the 1st declension. Indeed, the nom.sing.
generally began disappearing in 13th cent & have gone by the 14th, where
-s becomes the sign of the plural.
These are, of course, post-conquest. But one suspects that such trends
were already happening in the spoken language before they become apparent
in the written language. In any case, I guess the Norman overlords did
make some effort to communicate with the Saxon peasantry when it was
needed. Although maybe some enlightened Normans occasionally actually
learnt to speak English Saxon, I guess the normal interlanguage would be a
French-English pidgin. This would certainly account for the break down of
the older gender system and the Old English case system. Where such
contact pidgins develop, use is made of features the languages have in
common, therefore this would favor the extension of Old English -s forms.
The Scandinavian spread of -s in the northern dialects would accelerate the
process.
>Where, then, does OE get its s plural?
Ultimately from ProtoIndoEuropean - like the -s that appears in Latin & Greek.
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At 1:12 pm -0800 4/12/99, Sally Caves wrote:
[...]
>
>Taking out my much less dusty E.V. Gordon on Old Norse: -ar/-ir is by
>far
>the most common plural ending in Old Norse.
...which was derived from an older -az/ -iz. The Runic inscriptions use a
special symbol for this final consonant, which is conventionally
transliterated as R, showing that when Vikings were leaving their graffiti
around the sound was distinct from the regular /r/. It may well be that
when they came in contact with Saxon speakers in the north, the Saxon /s/
(of which [s] & [z] were allophones) re-inforced the [z] pronunciation of
protoNorse and in turn re-inforced the Old English -s plural, leading to a
levelling of the plural ending to -s [z].
>In the nominative, that is.
>I suspect that the -s ending in Old English was dominant only in
>English.
>Masculine a-stem, as I stated before. Heeeeeere's GOTHIC! Masculine
>o-stem:
>
> sa dags the day nominative
> this dagis the day's genitive
> thamma daga the day dative
> thana dag the day accusative
>
> thai dagos the day nominative plural S ENDING
> thize dage the days' genitive plural
> thaim dagam the days dative plural
> thans dagans the days accusative plural
Exactly, from ProtoGermanic -az IIRC.
[....]
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At 5:44 pm -0500 4/12/99, Padraic Brown wrote:
[...]
>From what I understand, Western Romance derives its plurals from the
>accusative form. Eastern Romance seems to retain the nominative.
Not so - the eastern forms also are, for the most part, derived from
accusatives also. It's just that the final -s developed into a palatal &
got voiced (or got voiced & then developed into a palatal :) thus: -as
--> *aj --> -e, -os --> *oj --> -i, -es --> *ej --> i. The only traces
of the old nom.plural are found with some 2nd. declension masc., e.g.
Italian 'amici' <-- 'amici'; 'amicos' would have given 'amichi' /a'miki/,
but: plural of 'amica' is 'amiche' /a'mike' from 'amicas'.
>Ex.: Ptg senhores, Cast sennores, Cat senyors, OProv senhors (obl),
>OFr seignors (obl), Fr seigneurs; but Sic signuri, Ital signori
Yep - except the Latin plural both nom. & acc. is 'seniores'. The Sicilian
& Italian forms are regularly derived from it.
>
>>Curious. Where, then, does OE get its s plural? German: s is a
>>plural in some words, but it's overshadowed by -er and -en plurals:
>>Die Manner, "the men." Die Lieder, "the songs." Die Gedanken, "the
>>thoughts." Die Autos, "the cars." No wonder Mike thought English
>>"s" plural came from the French.
>
>It always had one. The -ar in ON, the -as in OE and probably the -er
>in German come from Proto Germanic -az. Gothic retains the -s,
Eaxactly so - and I argue above that the -z plural was still used by the
Vikings settlers in northern Britain.
Ray.
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A mind which thinks at its own expense
will always interfere with language.
[J.G. Hamann 1760]
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