What is Relatedness?

[Steve Gustafson]

Rick McCallister writes:

>> Hasn't Frisian also generalised a plural in -ar or -er, which also
>> corresponds with what Norwegian and Swedish (and formerly Danish) did?

> Can you elaborate a bit more on the -ar/-er plural?
> While the English strong plural was -en,
> there seems to be some relic forms with -r-; actually -ren
> e.g. child-r-en, eyren Middle English dialect plural for <eggs>
> [unless the -r- of eyren was part of the singular stem and perhaps lost in
> the presumed singular <ey>]

Plurals in -r were one of a rather variable number of plural suffixes
available in Old English.  My understanding is, that they were one of the
first to be marginalized, and the other semi-irregular plural suffix, -en,
was compounded with it once they began to be felt as less than adequately
marked for plural.  (Not sure, but isn't the plural of 'egg' -Eier- in
standard German?)

What these plurals in -ren resemble, though, is NGmc -definite- plurals.
All of the Norse-derived language have a definite -suffix- in -inn or -it,
marked for case when case survives, which is attached to the suffix.  In
Swedish, this becomes -arna in the animate gender plural.  Some dialects
realize this suffix as /-ren/.

AAR, where I got my ideas about Frisian was from Robinson's -Old English and
Its Closest Relatives-, which observes that the oldest Frisian texts had
generalized a masculine plural suffix of -ar or -er, and speculates that
this plural suffix was borrowed from Old Norse.  [I don't know what modern
Frisian uses.]

--

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