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

Quoting "Douglas Koller, Latin & French" <latinfrench@...>:

> Andreas skrev:
>
> >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_.
>
> My handy-dandy little reference grammar lists five declensions:
>
> First: roughly 10% of Swedish nouns, common gender ending in "-a",
> plural in "-or". Three ending in a consonant are listed: "ros,
> rosor", "våg, vågor", och "svan, svanor."
_Svanor_? If I encountered that in a text, my immediate reaction would be to
take it as the pl of an unknown word *_svana_. The pl of _svan_ "swan" is
_svanar_.

> Okay, so it ain't paradise and the word "rule" may be a tad strong,
> but it's not completely up for grabs either. My dictionary gets even
> more specific, pointing to noun endings like "-ion" and "-tris" as
> taking "-er" in the plural. So if I was a bettin' man and encountered
> a common noun I didn't recognize, if it didn't end in one of those
> noun endings that invoke "-er," I'd run with the 2:1 odds on "-ar",
> and see if I were laughed out of town.
I guess there's no hard line for when the probability for a certain formation is
high enough to say it's the regular one, but I intuitively feel that 67% is too
low, and that I, as a native speaker, do not feel that -er plurals are any more
unexpected than -ar ones on this kind of nouns.

I don't have any data, but it seems that -er is more common on loans than on
native words. It might not be coincidental that -ion and -tris are foreign
endings; other foreign endings that force -er include -är and -an (as in
_amerikan_).

                                                     Andreas

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