[PLUG-TALK] A weighty subject for English speakers

Rich Shepard rshepard at appl-ecosys.com
Wed Feb 21 13:39:39 UTC 2018


On Tue, 20 Feb 2018, John Jason Jordan wrote:

> 'Poland' is Pole-land, i.e., land of the Poles.

   Same with the stans, home of the afgans, pakis, tzadiks, etc.

> The origin of these vowel shifts goes back at least as far as
> Indo-European, spoken ~6,000 years ago. Many nouns and verbs underwent
> vowel shifts as a syntactic feature - for nouns, to mark plural, for
> verbs, to mark past  and perfect forms. Although vastly reduced in
> present day English, we still have many of these. Nouns and verbs that
> undergo vowel shifts are called 'strong' and those that do not are
> called 'weak.'

   And I strongly encourage speakers to avoid noun verbification.

Regards,

Rich



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