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Re: English Changes or what into Conlangs

From:Patrick Dunn <tb0pwd1@...>
Date:Saturday, December 4, 1999, 23:43
On Sat, 4 Dec 1999, Nik Taylor wrote:

> 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 >
Can I guess, as an uneducated and ill-informed observer? My guess is that the adjectival forms simply didn't exist in OE -- after all, we had the genitive to do that work. When we lost the genitive, we had to come up with adjectival forms, and since French had them . . . the rest is l'histoire.