LL-L "Morphology" 2004.06.23 (04) [E]

Wed Jun 23 15:02:48 UTC 2004

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From: Global Moose Translations <globalmoose at t-online.de>
Subject: LL-L "Morphology" 2004.06.22 (06) [E]

Ron wrote:

> Sure, and there are cases like interpreting Greek-derived "kudos" and
> "gyros" as plural forms and deriving from them supposedly singular "kudo"
> and "gyro" respectively.
>
> However, this subject of more "exotic" specialized loan morphology (which
at
> least originally was outside the sphere of ordinary speakers, still is in
> many spheres of society) is somewhat marginal to this topic.  What I meant
> us to deal with is seemingly or actually irregular morphology of *native*
> words.

Fine, be that way - although it seems that most modern English words were
"exotic" at some point.

Still, I've got a "native" "kudo/gyro" example for you: the word "pease",
from which the supposedly singular form "pea" was derived a long time ago.
And then they eventually gave it a new plural form: "peas".

Gabriele Kahn

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From: Holger Weigelt <platt at holger-weigelt.de>
Subject: "Morphology"

> From: R. F. Hahn <sassisch at yahoo.com>
> Subject: Morphology
>
> Dear Lowlanders,
>
> Should any of you be alive/awake, I would like to revisit the topic of
> plural morphology and invite you to give me (us) some input from the point
> of view of various Lowlands language varieties.  In particular, I am
> currently interested in apparently irregular plural marking of nouns.
>
> As for double plural marking, so far I can come up with a few examples
from
> Dutch, Afrikaans and Lowlands Saxon (Low German), but I am sure that there
> are other varieties with this type of phenomenon as well.
>
> Dutch:
> schoen [sxuːn] 'shoe'
> schoenen [sxuːnə(n)] 'shoes'

Hello Ron !

Because it's late just in brief:
In Eastern Friesland Low Saxon we have a lot of words with double plurals
like the following few examples:
hūs / hūsen / hûs  (house)
bōm / bōmen / bööem  (tree)
land / lannen / lân  (country)
Sometimes the use of either of them is ruled by context. That means they are
not freely interchangeable.
Greetings
Holger

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From: Andy Eagle <andy at scots-online.org>
Subject: "Morphology"

Gabriele Kahn wrote:

>P.S. Ron, you'll probably find that posts from Europe will pick up
>again
>once the European football championship is over...

>From: R. F. Hahn wrote:

>Ah, thanks for reminding me!  I knew about it but didn't make the
>connection.  Don't folks have a *real* life, like Lowlanding?  ;-)

I Haven't watched any football games. So back to *real* life;-)

Aren't Children and kyne/kine examples of (double plurals) what
you're after?

child + er + en - children
Cow - kye + en - kyne

Andy Eagle

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From: John Duckworth <jcduckworth2003 at yahoo.co.uk>
Subject: Morphology

Greetings Lowlanders!

Ron said:

"In particular, I am currently interested in apparently irregular plural
marking of nouns."

I remember that when I was young all the older generation of people in
Lancashire (at least in the Preston area where I lived) used to use the
world _childer_ (with short /i/ ) as the plural of _child_ (which they
pronounced approximately as in modern Standard English, with /ai/ ). I
hardly ever heard _children_ from the older generation, unless it was from a
non-Lancastrian or someone educated outside the area.These days this plural
might still be heard occasionally, but it has more or less died out.

The plural _childer_ does also occur in MIddle English, though when I did a
search through a corpus of Chaucer's works I didn't come across it.
Surprisingly, it seems to occur quite a lot on the Internet, maybe as a sort
of preudo-Archaic form. The word also occurs in Scots (which I am sure Sandy
will confirm), and I am sure I have heard it in some of the American
dialects.

Ron also goes on to mention:

"Dutch:schoen [sxuËn] 'shoe'
schoenen [sxuËnÉ™(n)] 'shoes'

This reminds me of the fact that the older people in Lancashire also
occasionally used the plural _shoon_ for what we now call _shoes_.
(Reminding me of the Scots _shuin_.)

Ron, you also mention the fact that Standard English _fish_ has no separate
plural form, but again in the Lancashire dialect _fishes_ was quite common,
as in: _Theres loads o little fishes in' river_ (the apostrophe representing
a glottal stop).

I have been trying to rack my brains to see if I could remember any more
such plurals, but I can't for the moment.

Incidentally, Ron, I had trouble reading your phonetics and Hebrew
characters today even though I set my computer for unicode; did you use some
other encoding?

John Duckworth
Preston, UK.

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From: John Duckworth <jcduckworth2003 at yahoo.co.uk>
Subject: Morphology

I just remembered another example of an archaic plural preserved in
Lancashire. The older generation used to use two plurals for _eye_, one was
the regular _eyes_, but another was the more unusual _een_.

John Duckworth
Preston, UK

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From: R. F. Hahn <sassisch at yahoo.com>
Subject: Morphology

Thanks for the interesting input, everyone!

John (above):

> Incidentally, Ron, I had trouble reading your phonetics and Hebrew
> characters today even though I set my computer for unicode;
> did you use some other encoding?

Not that I know of, John.  I just looked at that posting again and could
read everything, and, yes, encoding mode is UTF-8.  Could it be that the IPA
symbols don't show with the font you load for UTF-8?  I could (should) use
SAMPA versions (http://www.phon.ucl.ac.uk/home/sampa/home.htm) as well, I
guess.  If you use Arial Unicode you should be able to read all symbols I
use.

Regards,
Reinhard/Ron

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