Re: English plural -(e)s

Benct Philip Jonsson scripsit:

> Possibly.  Certainly they were smart enough to figure
> out that [stA:nas] and [stainaz`] were the same things,
> especially in context ("Come on over here and help me
> remove those stones, will you?")
Here's where Tom Shippey's (concocted) examples come in:

# After Alfred, the Danes and the Saxons lived alongside each other
# for generations, more or less at peace. Because both their languages
# had the same Germanic roots, the language frontier broke down and a
# kind of natural pidgnisation took place that gradually simplified the
# structure of Old English....
#
# Consider what happens when somebody who speaks, shall we say, good
# Old English from the south of the country runs into somebody from the
# northeast from speaks good Old Norse.  They can no doubt communicate
# with each other, but complications in both languages are going to
# get lost. So if the Anglo-Saxon from the South wants to say (in good
# Old English) "I'll sell you the horse that pulls my cart," he says:
# "Ic selle the that hors the drageth minne waegn."  Now the old Norseman
# -- if he had to say this -- would say: "Ek mun selja ther hrossit er
# dregr vagn mine."
#
# So, roughly speaking, they understand each other. One says "waegn" and
# the other says "vagn". One says "hors" and "draegeth"; the other says
# "hros" and "dregr", but broadly they are communicating. They understand
# the main words. What they don't understand are the grammatical parts of
# the sentence. For instance, the man speaking good Old English says for
# one horse "that hors" but for two horses he says "tha hors". Now the
# Old Norse speaker understands the word horse all right, but he's not
# sure if it means one or two because in Old English you say "one horse",
# "two horse". There is no difference between the two words for horse. The
# difference is conveyed in the word "the" and the old Norseman might not
# understand this because his word for "the" doesn't behave like that. So:
# are you trying to sell me one horse or are you trying to sell me two
# horses? If you get enough situations like that there is a strong drive
# towards simplifying the language.

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