19 Jul
2009
19 Jul
'09
4:12 a.m.
2009/7/17 Rich Alderson <RichA at vulcan.com>:
Damnit. I knew there was at least one linguist on the list & I am no
more than an interested amateur. Excuse me while I remove my foot from
my mouth.
There.
I would feebly say in my defence that I though it was odd that the
strong/weak usage here did not match that for verbs, where of course
strong verbs are those that do not follow the standard pattern for
conjugation - but I had a reference, so I let it be. Serves me right.
Have you fixed the article?
Umlaut? Do you mean ablaut?
--
Liam Proven ? Profile: http://www.linkedin.com/in/liamproven
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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).
Interesting!
One of the
irregular plurals is -en: ox/oxen, child/children, man/men,
brother/brethren.
man/men is umlaut, like goose/geese.