Re: Rs

----- Original Message -----
From: "Garth Wallace" <gwalla@...>
To: <CONLANG@...>
Sent: Sunday, April 06, 2003 7:24 PM
Subject: Re: Rs


>...
> And Rosta wrote:
> > John:
> >
> >>It's not quite clear whether it was a sound change or something else
that
>...
> >>caused English to dump essentially all its -n inflections, both
infinitive
>...
> >>and noun plural, at the beginning of the Modern English period.  The
> >>"Lyke-Wake Dirge" from the 17th century still speaks of "hosen and
shoon",
>...
> >>though "hose" has now become a sort of mass noun, and "shoe" has a
regular
>...
> >>-s plural.  Of course, "children" still survives, with an even older
> >>pre-OE "-r" plural buried under the -n plural, and "brethren" and "oxen"
> >>are still with us, though "brothers" is the normal plural and And
reports
>...
> >>"oxes" as increasingly common
> >
> >
> > Increasingly common, that is, in idiolects, rather than in usage. The
> > point is that OX is a lexeme many neither hear nor use, & consequently
> > has become susceptible to regularization, as evidenced by the
> > judgements (of _oxes_ as the plural) by my students, who mostly are
> > around 20, have grown up in towns, & do not read much.
>
> Computer geek slang tends to self-consciously go in the other direction,
> using -en plurals with just about any word that ends in "x": boxen,
> unixen, linuxen, etc.
>
Though, of course, 'ox' is the only example of such a rule.  And that's only
because it used to be 'oxa', which was 'oxan' in the plural.