Re: Nostratic (was Re: Schwebeablaut (was Re: tolkien?))

On Thu, 18 Dec 2003 08:33:05 -0500, John Cowan <cowan@...>
wrote:

>And a good thing too, or the 3sg/3pl distinction would have vanished in
>the nominative due to sound change.  But the accusative pronoun _hem_
>survives still as part of the living speech of every anglophone, though
>it doesn't normally appear in writing expect in dialogue:  "I saw 'em
>going that way."
You are exactly right.  Perhaps the 3sg/3pl distinction was already
vanishing in the northern dialects of English, which apparently borrowed
the Norse 3pl pronoun first?  Are you sure that "'em" isn't just a
reduction of "them"?

>This OTOH was not sound change but a real functional shift: the plural
>became the polite form, as in most European languages, and then the
>familiar fell out of use except as preserved in the Bible translation,
>so it now seems ceremonious rather than familiar!
Right again.  Did feudalism and its ideas of lordship and formality have
anything to do with this?

- Rob