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From: mcv@inter.NL.net (Miguel Carrasquer)
Subject: Re: Plurals
Message-ID: <D18o18.Bur@inter.NL.net>
Organization: NLnet
References: <19DEC94.11813889.0031@music.mus.polymtl.ca> <D143Jr.6A0@cogsci.ed.ac.uk> <D14wG5.C4H@inter.NL.net> <1994Dec21.192649.6223@Princeton.EDU>
Date: Fri, 23 Dec 1994 00:58:20 GMT
Lines: 70

In article <1994Dec21.192649.6223@Princeton.EDU>,
Ronald Kim <rkim@bessel.Princeton.EDU> wrote:
>In article <D14wG5.C4H@inter.NL.net>, mcv@inter.NL.net (Miguel Carrasquer) writes:
>
>|> There are two ways of looking at this:  the "semi-cultured" words are
>|> simply early loans from Latin, versus the "cultured", more recent loans.
>|> This is Meyer-Lu"bke's analysis ("...words that don't have their
>|> origin in an uninterrupted oral tradition [*]").  
>
>	I believe that perhaps the most striking examples of this pheno-
>menon in Europe come from (modern) Greek.  

Very good point.


>|> Another way of looking at it is that words change at "different speeds".
>|> This doesn't seem to me to be the case for a word like "extracto"
>|> above, which I can only interpret as a loan from Latin.  But I'm not so 
>|> sure about "trato" or "Dios".
>
>	Perhaps, but then why did "tractus" lead to both "trecho" and "trato"?
>Were they already distinguished in Vulgar Latin, i.e. as two words with the
>same pronunciation but different meanings?  

It's always hard to tell whether it's one word with two different meanings,
or two words with the same pronunciation...  "trecho" is `stretch (distance)',
"trato" is `deal (treaty), treatment', both from Latin trahere, but semanti-
cally very distant.  The second word falls in the legal semantic sphere,
where Latin terms remained in use far longer, both in writing and in speaking.
A case can be made for an ininterrupted oral tradition amongst lawyers.

Is that a Latin oral tradition or a Spanish one?  It's hard to draw the
line.  It gets even more difficult when words change from one semantic
sphere or from one social sphere to another in the course of history.
In this particular case, it's rather a pity that the "vulgar" pronunciation
did not prevail in all semantic spheres: the phrase "!trato hecho!"
("it's a deal!") would then have been "!trecho hecho!" :-)  

>|> I still don't like the term "untransformed words", but Meyer-Lu"bke's
>|> phrase quoted above is equally unfortunate.
>
>	I would go along with "archaic borrowings" or something like that.
>Certainly languages such as German, which do not have a hallowed and illus-
>trious ancestor to turn to for vocabulary (German uses its own enormous
>word-formation potential instead), do not exhibit this phenomenon, or do
>so to a minute degree.  

In German or Dutch the role of cultured language was equally played by
Latin (and French later on).  There are even some interesting doublets:

Lat. be_ta  gives Dutch biet (old loan) or beet (younger loan).

Five cases can be distinguished for Latin e:

Old:
1) Lat. long e > Germ. e2 > Dutch ie  (biet, Graecus > Griek)

Middle:
2) Lat. short e > Dutch ie  (breve > brief, speculum > spiegel)
3) Lat. long e  > Dutch ij  (creta > krijt, poena > pijn)
(These forms are derived from Vulgar Latin pronunciations with
[e] > [E] > [ie]  and [e:] > [e.] (very closed e))
 
Recent:
4) 5) Latin e/e: > Dutch ee (beet, regula > regel, etc.)

-- 
Miguel Carrasquer         ____________________  ~~~
Amsterdam                [                  ||]~  
mcv@inter.NL.net         ce .sig n'est pas une .cig 
