Re: Multiple forms possible in morphology

On Sat, Feb 10, 2007 at 04:08:00PM +0100, Philip Newton wrote:

> Do any of you have words which have more than one permissible form?
> Differing, perhaps, in formality or style, with one being a bit more
> stilted, or seeming a bit archaic?
>
> Is one merely a phonetic simplification of the other? Or is one,
> perhaps, an older form which is still considered acceptable, if a bit
> old-fashioned? (For example, I read that in Latin, some words could
> also be declined as in Old Latin, e.g. nom -os, acc -om, if desired.)
Does it count if I reworked things early on and then declared the old
forms "archaic"?

No, probably not...  my diachronic linguistics was pretty bad at age
fifteen...

Amanda