Re: THEORY: derivation question

   Date:         Fri, 26 Mar 1999 07:04:11 +0000
   From: "Raymond A. Brown" <raybrown@...>

   At 4:48 pm -0600 25/3/99, Tom Wier wrote:
   >Padraic Brown wrote:
   >> It threw me for a loop, and no mistake. I'd only ever heard
   >> "dwarfs" as a verb. "The skyscraper dwarfs the house next to it"
   >> sort of thing. Same with "leafs" and "roofs", both are verbs in
   >> my book.
   >
   >Do any of our British friends know whether the voiceless, regular plural
   >is common in England and the UK?

   No it ain't common here.  'Dwarfs' is what our dictionaries say and also
   what most Brits say.  On the other hand, we mostly say 'leaves' although
   some computer geeks (not me) say 'leafs' when they mean terminal nodes of
   tree data structures

Thanks for coming to my rescue, Ray.

I've never seen 'dwarves' in a dictionary, but then the English
dictionaries published in Denmark are still quite British in their
outlook. (I have a Webster somewhere, but not here). So I looked it up
in Hotmail's online dictionary (also by Merriam-Webster), and there it
was: "pl. dwarfs, also dwarves."

I also found:
  M-W: scarfs, English-Danish dict: scarfs, also scarves.
  M-W: roofs, /-fs/ or /-vz/
  M-W: leaves, also leafs

Anyway, the point stands that if analogical pressures hadn't applied,
all of these would have had plurals in -ves only.

Lars Mathiesen (U of Copenhagen CS Dep) <thorinn@...> (Humour NOT marked)