[PLUG-TALK] A weighty subject for English speakers

[Tomas]

You really need to get your PC going John!!

Now, I am wodering about Hollander and Polander and cannot get it out
of my head!

-T

On Tue, 2018-02-20 at 17:18 -0800, John Jason Jordan wrote:
> 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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