Re: English Changes or what into Conlangs

Padraic Brown wrote:
> I'd like to quickly add that I've never split an infinitive in my
> life.  And am not precisely sure _how_ one would do it.
Really?  I do it all the time, "boldly to go" just sounds impossible.
"I told you never to do that again" sounds stilted, in fact, it sounds
almost like "never" should go with "told", to me.

"To boldly split infinitives that no man had split before", as it says
in the Hitch-hiker's Guide To The Galaxy.  :-)

> For what it's worth, I can't find an ON word with a plural in -s at
> all: nidhjar, soungvar, thakkir, etc.  Of course Gordon is biased
> towards Icelandic - do Old Danish or whatever have lots of plurals in
> -(e)s?
Well, consider that /r/ is often derived from /z/, I wonder if an early
stage of ON used /z/ in those words - perhaps the dialect used by the
Vikings kept that /z/ pronunciation?

> I am!  I think there was also a 12th or 13th century movement along
> the same lines, making English words for concepts that had French or
> Latin roots: ungothroughsome for impenetrable sort of thing.
Wasn't that 18th century, or did that movement pop up every so often?  I
remember reading of 18th century attempts to replace "loony" with
"mooned".

On that note, why have we so often borrowed foreign adjectives but kept
native nouns?  For example:

Eye/ocular
Moon/Lunar
Sun/Solar
Thought/Cognative
Brain/Cerebral (at least, I think Brain is native)
Mind/Mental

> Hem lives on, though: Give em hell, Sally!
Probably because most people think 'em is a contraction of "them".

--
"Old linguists never die - they just come to voiceless stops." -
anonymous
http://members.tripod.com/~Nik_Taylor/Conlang/W.html
http://members.tripod.com/~Nik_Taylor/Books.html
ICQ: 18656696
AIM Screen-Name: NikTailor