borrowing pronouns

[Yoel L. Arbeitman]

[ moderator re-formatted ]

At 10:35 AM 3/13/99 -0800, you wrote:
>Robert Orr wrote:

>Not to mention the entire 3rd-plural paradigm in Modern English,
>borrowed from Old Norse to replace the inherited WGmc. forms which had
>become indistinguishable from sing. forms.

 But the entire paradigm of the 3rd pl in NE is "they, them (acc.-dat.) and
their". So it might be less hyperbolic to say the "the-" stem for the 3rd pl.

This kind of pidgin is not unlike Pseudo- (movie) American "ME wanna take
white man's scalp" or such. Additionally, French does use the disjunctive
emphatic as in "Moi, je prefere parler le pidgin" or such where English
would not naturally say: *"Me/ As for me, I prefere to speak pidgin". This
may be contributory, take it from one who has NEVER seen the Muppets.

	YLA (see the end).

>> 3) And cf. the Muppets.  Miss Piggy would often use "moi" as the first
>> person singular pronoun while purportedly speaking English.

>And which has since spread to the speech of a great many Americans, many
>of whom [e.g. my wife] have at best an extremely limited knowledge of
>French.

>Best,
>Steven

>Steven Schaufele, Ph.D., Asst. Prof. of Linguistics, English Department
>Soochow University, Waishuanghsi Campus, Taipei 11102, Taiwan, ROC
>(886)(02)2881-9471 ext. 6504     fcosw5 at mail.scu.edu.tw
>http://www.prairienet.org/~fcosws/homepage.html
>        ***O syntagmata linguarum liberemini humanarum!***
>        ***Nihil vestris privari nisi obicibus potestis!***

I finally got to look up obex the word I didn't know. O.K. "O syntagms of
human tongues, free yourselves. You can lose nothing except your barriers".
Or is the construction (with rare gen. in this function) "O Syntagms, free
yourselves of human tongues/ languages. You can lose nothing but your
barriers"?