[PLUG-TALK] A weighty subject for English speakers
John Jason Jordan
johnxj at gmx.com
Wed Feb 21 01:18:47 UTC 2018
On Tue, 20 Feb 2018 23:15:39 +0000 (UTC)
Gregory Salter <winterbeastie at yahoo.com> dijo:
>No, but I have wondered plenty of silly stuff. Really. if a man from
>Poland is a Pole, why isn't a man from Holland a Hole?
'Poland' is Pole-land, i.e., land of the Poles. But 'Holland' is
Low-Land (Holle is cognate with English 'hole'). Unlike Poland, the
name of the country has to do with geographic features, not the people
who live there. I should add that you can take the name of the country
'Holland' and add the bound morpheme -er to make a person who lives
there (Hollander). And while I'm at it, 'Low German' refers to the
varieties that are spoken in the lowlands up by the North Sea, while
'High German' refers to the types that are spoken in the mountainous
southern regions.
>if you have more than one mouse, you have mice. if you have more than
>one Goose you have Geese. but if you have more than one Moose, you
>don't have Meese.
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.'
If you study the syntax of Anglo Saxon (459 CE to 1066 CE) you will
find that there were seven strong verb paradigms and one weak verb
paradigm, and similarly there were several paradigms for strong nouns
and one for weak nouns. It is important to note that a verb like 'take,
took, taken' is perfectly regular, as it follows ts paradigm perfectly.
A lot of people mistakenly think they are irregular because there are
few strong verbs and nouns surviving. And yet, deep in the crania of
native English speakers the strong paradigms are alive, witness the
switch from 'sneak, sneaked, sneaked' (weak) to 'sneak, snuck
snuck' (strong) within just the past 50 years or so.
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