Re: Probability of Article Replacement?

On Wednesday 26 February 2003 6:07 pm, John Cowan wrote:
> Joe scripsit:
> > He's right there.  I got confused by my(Yorkshire) grandfather saying
> > [In?l&v], 'in the lav' or 'in the toilet.
>
> You know, this makes me wonder if "the" is actually the underlying
> morpheme.  In the conventional written form of Yorkshire dialect, this is
> written "in t'lav", as if /T/ > /t/.  But in fact the /t/ is realized as
> [?], suggesting that it is underlyingly at the end of a syllable.
>
> Perhaps what we have here is a survival of the Gmc *neuter* demonstrative,
> generalized to all nouns, which surfaces as "it" in Frisian, "het" in
> Dutch, and (perhaps more relevantly, given the history of Yorkshire as
> part of the Danelaw) "et/ett" in Scandinavian languages.  In that case,
> "in 't lav" would be a better written form.  Normative OE is Southern
> and doesn't show this form with neuter nouns: instead we see 'tha:' > the.
I agree, though I think it's still derived from 'the', rather that 'et'.

> Any takers?
>
> > Which, in the UK, means 'in the
> > bathroom', before any of you crazy americans get the wrong idea ;-)
>
> "Lavatory" means the room here, though "toilet" means the stool.  To a
> plumber, however, "lavatory" means the sink, and etymology is on his side,
> from Latin "lavare" = "wash".
In the UK, all the terms are interchangeable.

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