Re: New Brithenig words, part Deux.

On Thu, May 24, 2001 at 11:53:21PM -0400, Padraic Brown wrote:
> On Fri, 25 May 2001, Dan Jones wrote:
>
> >andrew yscrifef:
> >
> >> > hog, porch < porcus
> >>
> >> Yes.
> >
> >*Please* can we have ill porch -> llo phyrch? Just a few irregular nouns
> >would make Brithenig more interesting.
>
> This is certainly an old argument. I'd certainly like to see irregular
> forms all over the place; but the regularity of the nouns at least was
> established some years ago. A few irregular verbs have appeared since
> I started with Brithenig, though. Perhaps some irregular nounds will
> yet be coaxed out.
>
Oh dear, I've thrown a bigger spanner into the works than I'd intended. The
vowel changing plurals have to be based on the nominative plural of masc.
o-stems, i.e. /-i:/ whether you're working from British or Latin. In other
words, you have to assume that the nominative plural survived as in Italian,
not the accusitive pl. /-o:s/ as in Spanish, French etc. You'd have to
assume that your Latin base was different from the vulgar latin of Gaul.
Kennith Jackson has of course suggested in LHEB that the Latin that went
into Proto-Welsh etc. wasn't the dog-latin of the urban hoi polloi, but a
sort of rather correct school Latin used by the rural gentry. This may not
stand up to scrutiny "here", but could have happened "there", especially
since Londinium was still overrun by the Saxon hords. Certainly it's the
nominative rather than the accusative that has survived in Welsh, Cornish
and Breton. In Old Irish there was still a nom/acc distinction, when the
two cases merged it was generally the accusitive that was lost.

If you lose the /-i:/ ending then all you have left to mark plurals is
the debris of the various consonant stems -on- -jon- -ow- -nt- -ik- etc.
most of which get recycled in WCB. as plural endings. Otherwise you have
to depend on a "compulsory" article etc. as in modern French to mark
plurality. Languages like Malay seem happy to leave number unmarked most
of the time, but European langs usually only allow this in a few words
e.g. English "sheep".

I'm afraid the vowel change plurals are so much a feature of WCB (and
AFAIK Sindarin) than I just expect to find them in any language styled
on Welsh etc. From the following they would seem to occur in Kerno
and Arvorec, hmmm some very convoluted diaglossae must be involved :-)

> >
> >Arvorec has ... and torc'h, as
> >"pig" from the Gaulish *torcos, plural týrc'h.
>
BTW if you put Quenya through the GMP as someone has suggested, won't you
end up with Sindarin?

> Padraic.

Keith

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