Re: New Brithenig words, part Deux.

Raymond Brown <ray.brown@...> wrote :

> At 5:18 pm +0000 26/5/01, kam@CARROT.CLARA.NET wrote:
>> 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.
> Agreed.
>> 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.
> Hang on - the nominative _did_ survive in Old French, cf.
>                     SINGULAR     PLURAL
>          Nominative:  murs        mur
>             Oblique:  mur         murs
Yes, that looks familiar.

>> You'd have to
>> assume that your Latin base was different from the vulgar latin of Gaul.
> Why?  It's clear from Old French that not only did the -i nominative plural
> of the 2nd. decl. survive in Gaul, it actually got extended to some 3rd
> dec. nouns ...
Thanks, Ray, it's a good job there's someone here who knows what they're
talking about. Because Brithenig uses the acc. pl. like Spanish, I'd
jumped to the conclusion that Gaulish romance must have gone the same way,
if not why ditch the useful -i: plural in Brithenig, given that Welsh etc
on which B. seems to be modelled kept the equivalent British ending.
Unfortunately, we have no record of proto- Welsh, Cornish, Breton at
the equivalent to the Old French stage, so we don't really know how the
cases fell together. For example in modern Gaelic masc. o-stems have
evolved to :

singular nom./acc./dat.  fear  << weros -on -u ["man" like L. vir]
         genitive        fir   << weri

plural   nom./acc/dat.   fir   << weri
         gen.            fear  << weron

(the dative plural surives in poetry etc, fearaibh << werabis
 and the old acc. plural has been recycled as a vocative pl,
  a fheara! "o men!" << weru:s)
Like OF there would at some stage have been a conflict in British between
the gen. sing. and the nom. plural, both in -i or later with the vowel
changes that it caused before dropping. The nom. forms won out over the
oblique cases as eventually happened in French or course.

> Ray.
Keith

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