Re: Synopsis

On Fri, 26 Dec 2008 19:21:56 -0500, John W Kennedy
<jwkenne@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in
<news:49557596$0$4885$607ed4bc@xxxxxx> in
rec.arts.sf.composition:

On 12/26/08 6:25 PM, Brian M. Scott wrote:

On Fri, 26 Dec 2008 15:42:09 -0600, Suzanne Blom
<sueblom@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote in
<news:GaCdnUBb3Kou0sjUnZ2dnUVZ_g-dnZ2d@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> in
rec.arts.sf.composition:

[...]

I want to do what was done to peasen, that is, chop off
the last couple of letters and make it regular.

That's probably the real difference in how we look at it: I
think of English as having several regular nominal
declensions, one of which -- the<-(e)s> plural -- is the
default. Thus, instead of seeing<theses> and<criteria> as
irregular plurals, I see them as regular plurals of minor
declensions.

I kind of like what happened to the plural of<child>. The
Old English noun was<cild>, pronounced roughly like modern
English<chilled>, a neuter noun originally with an
identical plural. In late Old English, however, the noun
was assimilated to the class of nouns that contained<lamb>
'a lamb',<cealf> 'a calf', and<æg> 'an egg', which formed
their plurals by adding<-ru>:<lamb(e)ru>,<cealfru>,
<ægru>, and eventually<cildru> 'children'. In Middle
English this regularly became<childre> and<childer>. In
southern ME, however, there was a tendency to generalize the
<-en> plural exemplified by<oxen> (OE<oxa> 'an ox',<oxan>
'oxen'), much as the<-(e)s> plural has been generalized in
the standard language. Where the North and the Midlands had
<childre> and<childer>, the South had<child(e)ren>, and it
is this southern form that has (somewhat exceptionally)
become standard. And if that double change of declension
isn't enough, the Old Northumbrian dialect of OE sometimes
made the noun masculine, with plural<cildas>; this plural
presumably underlies the rare Northern ME<childes> (15th
c.).

And just for fun: if we'd regularly inherited our word for
'egg' from OE instead of borrowing it from Old Norse, we'd
probably speak of one 'ay' (or one 'aye'), but a dozen
'ayre' (or perhaps 'ayer'). (We might spell it with initial
<e> instead of<a>.)

Actually, we inherited both, but William Caxton, the first
English printer, made a deliberate choice to standardize
on "egg/egges" instead of "ey/eyren".

The Southern ME plural <eyren> is not inherited from OE:
it's another example of the Southern tendency to assimilate
nouns to the n-stem declension. The inherited plural was
<eyre>, which was then extended in the same way that
<childer> was extended to <child(e)ren>, <breth(e)re> to
<breth(e)ren>, etc.

When I said 'we', I was referring to speakers of Present-Day
English, who have inherited neither a regular reflex of OE
<ægru> 'eggs' nor a regular reflex of Southern ME <eyren>.

Brian
.

Relevant Pages

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