Re: R: Re: R: A funny linguistic subway experience + some questions about nouns of days and months

On Sat, 2 Dec 2000, Christophe Grandsire wrote:

> It doesn't surprise me. Names generally don't follow regular processes (in
> French for instance, the first name François /fRa~'swa/ and the adjective
> français /fRa~'sE/ derive from the same form françois /fRa~'swE/, but while the
> adjective followed a regular change - most final /wE/ became /E/ in Modern
> French, the name didn't).
In fact this change applies quite unpredictably:  "danois" for instance
remained "ois".  The split happened in the 18th C but it was only in
the 19th C that the Academy cleaned up the spelling.

--
John Cowan                                   cowan@ccil.org
One art/there is/no less/no more/All things/to do/with sparks/galore
        --Douglas Hofstadter