Newsgroups: sci.lang
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From: iad@cogsci.ed.ac.uk (Ivan A Derzhanski)
Subject: Re: Plurals
Message-ID: <D0ypwB.IKG@cogsci.ed.ac.uk>
Organization: Centre for Cognitive Science, Edinburgh, UK
References: <42794@dog.ee.lbl.gov> <3coec1$h0u@uwm.edu> <42829@dog.ee.lbl.gov>
Date: Sat, 17 Dec 1994 16:02:33 GMT
Lines: 21

In article <42829@dog.ee.lbl.gov> veklerov@spindle.ee.lbl.gov (Eugene Veklerov) writes:
>Of course, there is a legal issue here as well.  If the Russian
>language is a successor or heir of the Slavonic language,
>then the former did not borrow words from the latter.
>Rather, it simply inherited them.

Not necessarily.  It's very common for languages to borrow words from
their ancestors.  Russian and the other Slavic languages haven't done
that much borrowing from Old Slavic, because the latter has never been
too widely used by its descendants' speakers; on the other hand, French
is full of Latin loanwords, or Hindi of Sanskrit ones.  Such words can
be recognised by the fact that they haven't undergone the phonetic
changes that they would've done, had they been inherited.  For example,
a Spanish word starting in _cl-_ or _pl-_ has to be a loanword, because
in the inherited ones those Latin clusters have become _ll-_.

-- 
`Release Jesus wi this mob hangin aroon?  Nae chance!'  (The Glasgow Gospel)
Ivan A Derzhanski (iad@cogsci.ed.ac.uk, iad@chaos.cs.brandeis.edu)
* Centre for Cognitive Science,  2 Buccleuch Place,   Edinburgh EH8 9LW,  UK
* Cowan House E113, Pollock Halls, 18 Holyrood Pk Rd, Edinburgh EH16 5BD, UK
