Re: Performative verbs (was: Re: here is some stuff i want all of ya'll to look at)

Quoting John Cowan <jcowan@...>:

> English also has many fewer irregular forms (counting all the strong
> verbs as irregular, as one must in modern Germanic languages) than
> any of its relatives, not surprisingly.  Not counting the Latin and
> Greek borrowings with their attached plurals, English has only about
> 30 irregular nouns.
If we treat all Swedish and German nouns with impredictible plurals as
irregular, we're looking at very significant percentages of the dictionaries.

For instance, there is no rule I'm aware of for telling whether a Swedish
non-neuter noun ending in a consonant gets _-er_ or _-ar_ in the plural. And
then there's the really irregular ones like _ros_ "rose", pl _rosor_.

Something I find nifty is the existence of pairs like _mask_, pl _masker_,
"masque", and _mask_, pl _maskar_, "worm", or _slav_, pl _slavar_, "slave", and
_slav_, pl _slaver_, "Slav".

                                                     Andreas

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