"Meerns" query

[Peter A. McGraw]

Mijnheer is always pronounced "meneer" [m at ne:r] today, though I don't know
how long that has been so.  The (highly formal) plural is the full "Mijne
heren" [maejn@ he:r@].  (I also don't know how long ago final -n in
unstressed syllables was lost.  It's still available for citation
pronunciation.)  In any case, to get from there to "meerns" would require
considerable garbling, and it's a stretch to imagine any processes within
Dutch that would yield that particular garbling  (loss of the stem n from
"mijne" and the h- from "heren", retention of a now-archaic final n in
"heren", the vowel derived from English spelling rather than the Dutch
pronunciation, and addition of the English plural ending after the Dutch
one).  Even if none of that occurred in Dutch, it seems an unusual amount
of garbling for a borrowing.  Perhaps it's an idiolectal garbling of a
loanword the writer heard imperfectly.

Peter Mc.

--On Thu, Dec 21, 2000 8:34 PM -0800 "A. Maberry"
<maberry at U.WASHINGTON.EDU> wrote:

> Just looking through Jansonius' Groot Nederlands-Engels Woordenboek voor
> studie en praktiek (3 vols.; Leiden, 1950), I find a reference from
> Mijnheer to "Meneer" nothing under "Meerns". I don't know anything about
> Dutch, much less Dutch dialects to know if it is a possible variant which
> would involve metathesis.
>
> allen
> maberry at u.washington.edu
>
> On Thu, 21 Dec 2000, Laurence Horn wrote:
>
>> > Could it possibly be related to "Mijnheer(n)"?
>> >
>> > This is just what sprang to mind; an uneducated guess, as it were.
>> >
>> > Erin McKean
>> > editor at verbatimmag.com
>>
>> I think Erin's suggestion of Dutch may be on the right track, to
>> judge from this web posting (the only one that google turns up for
>> "Meerns").  Unfortunately, my Dutch isn't really up to it, and my
>> dictionary isn't on me at the moment.  Anyone else?  Would a San
>> Francisco newspaper in 1913 really have been in a position to
>> presuppose familiarity with Dutch category or address labels?  Well,
>> this WAS some years ago...
>>
>> larry
>>
>>   ===============
>> http://www.xs4all.nl/~odyssey/vm/persoonlijkspelweek5.html
>> Typisch Meerns:
>>
>>                                        Heel fanatiek zijn in de dingen
>> waar je van houdt. Zo
>>                                        komen er iedere week weer
>> duizenden mensen
>>                                        naar het stadion om ons aan te
>>                                        moedigen. Dat zijn toch mooie
>>                                        dingen.
>> =================
>> >
>> >>     I have come across "Meerns" as a term of address in a 1913
>> >> sports article but am unable to determine its exact meaning.  It
>> >> does not seem to be listed in the dictionaries.
>> >>
>> >>     The word appears in the newspaper _San Francisco Bulletin_,
>> >> March 11, 1913, p. 18, cols. 5-6, over the photograph of former
>> >> baseball player Bill Lange. The relevant sentence is:
>> >>
>> >> 'As Pop Anson would pause to remark, "I knew him when he was the
>> >> equal of a bum baseball player they call Tyrus Raymond Cobb." Yes,
>> >> Meerns, that was some years ago.'
>> >>
>> >>     Would anyone have any suggestions?
>> >>
>> >> ---Gerald Cohen
>>



****************************************************************************
                               Peter A. McGraw
                   Linfield College   *   McMinnville, OR
                            pmcgraw at linfield.edu