" to shod " !!

[Wilson Gray]

Quite so. I agree, as usual. It was only as a child that I had a
problem with understanding the verb vs. noun semantic dichotomy. Well,
I guess that there's nothing to understand. You just accept it, like
"go, went" or "eleven, twelve."

OT: BTW, does anyone know of *any* language in which "go" is simply a
regular verb of some sort and not some suppletive grouping analogous
to "go, went"? I've haven't been looking for any such language, but
I've been struck by the fact that "go" is oddly eerie in a majority of
the languages with which I have at least a reading acquaintance. Not
particularly many, needless to say, sinece with respect to Germanic,
Romance and Slavic, it's know one, know all.

And yes, I am aware of Latin _io, ire, ii/ivi; io, is, itum_; eo, is,
it, imus, itis, eunt_, which comes pretty close to regular, WRT to
suppletion, though it is irregular by definition of standard Latin
grammar-books. But, if you compare it to a random daughter, like, e.g.
_ir_ in eth biarnes d'era montunha, you get _voi, vas, vat, vam, vatz,
van_ or _anoi, anas, anat, anam, anatz, anan. (For sticklers: yes, I
have "regularized" the spelling, following Peir Bec in abstracting
away from French-based, eye-phonetic spelling.)

-Wilson

On Wed, Sep 2, 2009 at 4:14 PM, Laurence Horn<laurence.horn at yale.edu> wrote:
> ---------------------- Information from the mail header -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: " to shod " !!
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> At 3:15 PM -0400 9/2/09, Wilson Gray wrote:
>>Sadly, in addition to "trod, trodded," you will also find "tread,
>>treaded." But there were probably many who cried themselves to sleep
>>when "to want" ceased to mean "to lack" and, via "to need," evolved
>>into "to desire."
>>
>>It's not heard much, if at all, nowadays. But, in my childhood, the
>>noun, "want," was an everyday word, unfortunately still more or less
>>carrying the original sense, meaning something like, "lacking the
>>basics of life: food, clothing, and shelter.". When I heard things
>>like, "Those fleeing the advance of the Wehrmacht are seriously in
>>want" and "The children orphaned as a consequence of the war suffer
>>greatly from want," I really had to work to winkle out their meanings,
>>since noun and verb have irreconcilable differences.
>>
>
> Maybe when FDR promised to help assure the Four Freedoms, the third
> entry in his list, "freedom from want", was reinterpreted as a
> reference to our right to indifference.
>
> Actually, I think the sense of "want" you refer to is alive and well
> in the right syntactic frames--"want for nothing", "suffer
> from/free(dom) from want", "in want (of)", "for want of", etc.
>
> LH
>
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>



--
-Wilson
–––
All say, "How hard it is that we have to die!"---a strange complaint
to come from the mouths of people who have had to live.
-----
-Mark Twain

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