17 Jul
2009
17 Jul
'09
3:37 p.m.
From: Liam Proven
Sent: Friday, July 17, 2009 2:18 PM
The -en ending is a feature from Anglo-Saxon Old
English. The -x
ending is a red herring.
In OE, nouns were divided into strong and weak. Strong
nouns formed a
regular plural - book/books, frog/frogs - weak ones had an irregular
plural: cow/kine. Sometimes it was an ablaut, where just the vowel
changes: mouse/mice, goose/geese. German does something similar:
vogel/v?gel ("bird"/"birds").
I just took at look at the Wrongipedia page to see whether the confusion
was Liam's or theirs. It's theirs.
In Germanic grammar (as an academic subject), *strong* nouns are the ones
with different endings, or umlaut (goose/geese), or both. I don't recall
any nouns forming a plural via ablaut (sing/sang/sung/song is an example
of ablaut in English). *Weak* nouns are the ones with -en.
Historically, BTW, that -en was part of the *stem*, and the original
endings were lost in the transition from Proto-Indo-European to Proto-
Germanic. Compare English oxen, German Ochsen, with Sanskrit uks.anas
(where the dot should be beneath the preceding <s>, indicating an "sh"-
like pronunciation).
One of the irregular plurals is -en: ox/oxen,
child/children, man/men,
brother/brethren.
man/men is umlaut, like goose/geese.
The hackish use of it for VAX, box, etc. is just
intentional
overgeneralisation: knowingly applying a specific rule in a
non-specific case.
http://dictionary.die.net/overgeneralization
A possible origin, hints Wikipedia, is that it's a
bunch of unrelated
vaxes, but a cluster of vaxen.
The Jargon File suggests this is by extension from
"vixen", but not
why... "Vixen" being a female fox; "fox" is a strong noun: fox/foxes.
The *original* Jargon File states that it's from "oxen", with the sound
*perhaps* helped along by "vixen". It wouldn't surprise me that ESR
would ****^Wget that wrong, too.
But perhaps it's to denote interchangeability:
http://foldoc.org/boxen
Rich Alderson
Vintage Computing Server Engineer
Vulcan, Inc.
505 5th Avenue S, Suite 900
Seattle, WA 98104
mailto:RichA at vulcan.com
(206) 342-2239
(206) 465-2916 cell
http://www.pdpplanet.org/
...who has spent most of the last 4 decades doing Indo-European studies.