Re: English Changes or what into Conlangs

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.