Re: English Changes or what into Conlangs

Thanks Ray... long informative post.  And BTW, the z to r
phenomenon is called, I believe, rrrrrrrrrrhotacism.
I should be ashamed of myself, it's right here in Pyles
But it's tons more fun asking you guys.  <G>  Now I've
never cottoned to this rule; z seems such an unlikely
sound to end up as "r."  But "r" is strange.

Raymond Brown wrote:

> 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.
He wanted to know if English got its "s" from French.

Very erudite, polished, helpful commentary on s plurals in Latin
erased for bandwidth reasons:

> >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.
> [....]
> ------------------------------------------------------------------
> At 5:44 pm -0500 4/12/99, Padraic Brown wrote:
> >
> >>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.
Perhaps so.
Sally
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SALLY CAVES
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