Newsgroups: sci.lang
Path: cantaloupe.srv.cs.cmu.edu!das-news2.harvard.edu!news2.near.net!howland.reston.ans.net!EU.net!sun4nl!mcv
From: mcv@inter.NL.net (Miguel Carrasquer)
Subject: Re: Plurals
Message-ID: <D11zuE.IFF@inter.NL.net>
Organization: NLnet
References: <42794@dog.ee.lbl.gov> <3coec1$h0u@uwm.edu> <42829@dog.ee.lbl.gov> <D0ypwB.IKG@cogsci.ed.ac.uk>
Date: Mon, 19 Dec 1994 10:30:14 GMT
Lines: 27

In article <D0ypwB.IKG@cogsci.ed.ac.uk>,
Ivan A Derzhanski <iad@cogsci.ed.ac.uk> wrote:
>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-_.

Exactly.  Maybe as a native speaker of Spanish I can give an example
of this phenomenon in Slavonic...  The obvious one for Russian is
gorod ~ grad.  The word with "polnoglasie" is inherited, "grad" is
a loanword from Church Slavonic (as are glas, glaz, etc).  

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