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Re: CHAT: Must Needs? (WAS: Lighting Some Flames: Towards conlang artistry)

From:Raymond Brown <ray.brown@...>
Date:Wednesday, March 20, 2002, 18:05
At 10:56 am +0000 19/3/02, Lars Henrik Mathiesen wrote:
>> Date: Tue, 19 Mar 2002 06:20:23 +0000 >> From: Raymond Brown <ray.brown@...> >> >> If its inevitable that you do a certain action, then you _need_ to >> do it. The connexion in meaning is fairly clear, but as for the >> morphology, I don't know. > >www.m-w.com: > >Main Entry: needs >Pronunciation: 'nEdz >Function: adverb >Etymology: Middle English nedes, from Old English nEdes, from > genitive of nEd need >Date: before 12th century > : of necessity : NECESSARILY <must needs be recognized>
Thanks - I thought "needs" might've originated from some fossilized inflected form. :) So 'must needs' = 'must of necessity'/'must necessarily' That precisely the way I use the phrase! One thing is certain, "must needs" is _not_ an old way of just saying _must_; the two are not synonymous, otherwise when I use "must", I could also say "must needs". This is definitely not so. Arguably, when I say "must needs", I could just say "must" (tho with some loss of meaning); but the reverse is simply not true. Ray, the archaic speaker from Sussex :) ========================================= A mind which thinks at its own expense will always interfere with language. [J.G. Hamann 1760] =========================================