Re: English Changes or what into Conlangs

abrigon wrote:
>
> I agree Axiem that English needs to have some standardized way of adding
> new words as well as those words we already have. Also agree about the
> term Oxen and all, I believe in German the -en is still used.. Why did
> we get stuck with -es and -s, I think it may have alot to do with those
> who wrote dictionaries back in the 16th Century, who wanted a lingo to
> be more Latin/French looking.
Ah no no no no no no.  You can get any good History of the English
Language
book; even The Story of English with its videos, before you make
generalizations
like that.  Grammarians have really very low imput in the changes that
occur
in languages; the eighteenth century grammarians are exceptional, but
even so,
their prescriptions were based on usage and not invention.  What the
upperclass
used, that is.  And even so, their prescriptions are broken all the
time.  Do
we still split infinitives?  Do we still say lay for lie?  Do we still
say "I
don't like him going" instead of "I don't like his going"?  We're
constantly
being corrected for "mistakes" that were there in Shakespeare's day and
earlier.

In English the plural endings and the inflections were leveled because
of
contact with other languages, notably Old Norse and Norman French.

In Old English, there were a number of ways to form plurals.  The
masculine
a=stem was the most common, and that's what gave us our "s" ending in
the
plural:

        stan    stone nominative
        stanes  stone's genitive
        stane   stone dative
        stan    stone accusative

        stanas  stones nominative plural
        stana   stones' genitive plural
        stanum  stones dative plura.
        stanas  stones accusative plural.

Then there was neuter a stem which had no distinction between singular
and
plural in the nominative and accusative cases:

        word    hors    deor    fisc
        wordes  horses  deores  fisces
        worde   horse   deore   fisce
        word    hors    deor    fisc

        word    hors    deor    fisc
        worda   horsa   deora   fisca
        wordum  horsum  deorum  fiscum
        word    hors    deor    fisce

Fish and deer and sheep still retain the old neuter a=stem plurals, but
word
and horse and a bunch of others acquired BY ANALOGY the endings in the
a-stem,
the commonest paradigm.  This was a necessity when dealing with the
Scandinavian
peoples who were intermarrying and doing business with the English in
the
North.  Instead of having stan/stanas, hors/hors, boc/bec, just make
them all
the same:  stone/stones, horse/horses, book/books.  In a way, it was a
little
like pidgening English.  Some of the words, like oxen, resisted this
leveling.

> Basically was the change of the lingo from
> Old to Middle and later to Modern real changes or were they forced on us
> by those who wanted changes?
It depends on what you mean by "real change."

Usage is the biggest factor in language change, Mike.  By the sixteenth
century, the basic components of the English language were already in
place.  The rest was top spin.  We didn't have any successful attempt to
regularize either the spelling or the grammar of English until the
eighteenth
century.  Samuel Johnson's Dictionary of the English language helped
establish
standard English spelling in ways that no other attempts could (and
there
were many, including Orm's Ormulum from the thirteenth century).  But
you
might be interested in the "ynkhorn" movement in in the late fifteen
hundreds,
where it became very fashionable to "english" certain Latin terms--and
much
criticized:  adnichilate ("orphaned"--which didn't catch on);
annihilate,
which did.  I have a whole list of these, if anyone is interested.
Notably,
it was Shakespeare who contributed several thousand ynkhorn terms to
established vocabulary.  Words we take for granted, like "obscene," and
many
many others, are standard words grace a Shakespeare, who introduced them
into his plays as YNKHORNS (a derogatory term referring to their origins
in
some over-educated writer's study).  Is this "real change" if it's
adopted
into the language?

Another "real change":  the change from hem to them.  Hem sounded too
much
like "him," so people in the south of England started adopting Northern
Scandinavian "them" to distinguish the two words.  This wasn't a change
that was "foisted" on anyone.  It just happened.  Language follows
usage,
and follows the masses.  Often the "privileged" masses, like the London
dialect.  Same with he and heo, he and she.  The two sounded
too much alike, so the northern Scandinavian form was adopted in the
south.
And in London.  And everyone followed suit.

Sally
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