Re: Phoneme winnowing continues
| From: | John Cowan <cowan@...> |
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| Date: | Wednesday, June 4, 2003, 0:44 |
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Mark J. Reed scripsit:
> To be sure, English is full of irregular plurals that were borrowed
> along with the singular, mostly from Latin
What's different about those Latin and Greek forms is that their plurals
come with them no matter when the borrowing is made. If today I introduce
a new borrowing from Greek, I automatically carry the Greek plural with me;
it is a *rule* of English that Latin and Greek borrowings come in pairs.
Eventually the plural may get replaced ("pendulums", e.g.), true.
--
[W]hen I wrote it I was more than a little John Cowan
febrile with foodpoisoning from an antique carrot jcowan@reutershealth.com
that I foolishly ate out of an illjudged faith www.ccil.org/~cowan
in the benignancy of vegetables. --And Rosta www.reutershealth.com
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