Re: Love Those Double Vowels (was: Diving In...)

From: "Nik Taylor" <fortytwo@...>
> Muke Tever wrote:
> > It is, though, even though we only have it in two English words, both of
them
> > pronouns that go the same way:
> >
> >         m.e    m.y   m.ine
> >        th.ee  th.y  th.ine
>
> To call those inflectional paradigms is rather stretching the term,
> IMO.
Er, I didn't call them inflectional paradigms.  The only ones that belong to the
personal pronoun paradigm are "me" (which has no separate forms surviving,
outside of the suppletive "I", although German still has "mir" separate from
"mich") and "thee" (which only remains with "thou").

"mine" and "thine" were derived possessive adjectives, like Ger. "mein" and
"dein".  [Actually, doesn't German have four or five such ones in -ein ?]

> Even if there's historically an inflectional ending there (I'm not
> sure if there is), in synchronic terms, they're merely coincidental
> similarities.
It certainly isn't productive, and even though it mayn't thus be recognized by
all native speakers, it's still a morpheme, just as much as the {-ther} for
family members that we only have in {brother}, {mother}, and {father} is.

    *Muke!

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