Re: CHAT: Parallelism
| From: | Nik Taylor <fortytwo@...> |
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| Date: | Wednesday, June 16, 1999, 6:24 |
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John Cowan wrote:
> The standard explanation is that regularity takes over when the
> form is infrequent, so irregularities are preserved in the commonest
> forms.
But this was a form lost among *peasants*, for whom cows would be quite
familiar, yes? So, why would they start saying "cows", when surely they
would've heard the form "kyne" quite frequently? Could that have been a
northern influence, an example of a Norse-influenced change trickling
southward? Is there any evidence on how Scots and northern Englishmen
pluralized cow?
--
Happy that Nation, - fortunate that age, whose history is not diverting
-- Benjamin Franklin
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