Re: I'm back, sort of

M. Astrand scripsit:

> Speaking three different Germanic languages seems to have created all kinds
> of unhelpful software in my brain. The Germanic Cognate Finder keeps telling
> me that the English for 'to write' is _to scribe_, and the really annoying
> one was suggesting _commune_ for _municipality_ (Sw. _kommun_)...
Such software is mostly more helpful than unhelpful, though it can produce
these sorts of bizarre glitches.  Douglas Hofstadter talks about his
Romance Cognate Finder which induces him to say *mucca instead of mosca
in Italian (for "fly"), clearly founded on French mouche.
Presumably the analogue is something like vache:vacca::mouche:mucca.

The same or a similar engine has moved a few English regular verbs to
irregular in recent centuries:  shit/shat, dive/dove, and doubtfully
twig/twug.  The overwhelming trend, of course, has been in the other
direction.

--
John Cowan  www.ccil.org/~cowan  jcowan@reutershealth.com  www.reutershealth.com
[P]olice in many lands are now complaining that local arrestees are insisting
on having their Miranda rights read to them, just like perps in American TV
cop shows.  When it's explained to them that there are in a different country,
where those rights do not exist, they become outraged.  --Neal Stephenson