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From: alderson@netcom13.netcom.com (Richard M. Alderson III)
Subject: Re: the "s" inflection of Spanish
In-Reply-To: rraffer1@osf1.gmu.edu's message of 23 Jan 1997 22:39:07 GMT
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Date: Mon, 27 Jan 1997 08:24:28 GMT
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In article <5c8pab$30d@portal.gmu.edu> rraffer1@osf1.gmu.edu (Ryan M Rafferty)
writes:

>In learning Spanish I noticed that the language uses an "s" suffixed to the
>singular form of a word to denote the plural.  From my knowledge of Latin and
>Italian, which is very close to Spanish, these other Romance languages use a
>totally different inflection--usually by adding the vowel "i" in Italian,
>which I assumed evolved from the Latin "ae".

You say you are familiar with Latin (which is not a Romance language in the
usual sense, being instead related to their ancestral language).  Will you be
satisfied if I simply say that in Western Romance languages (French, Spanish,
Portuguese, etc.) the singular forms developed from the homophonous dative/
ablative singular, while the plural forms developed from the accusative?  Old
Spanish, at one time, still had forms that demonstrate this, as did Old French.

>Also, the Germanic languages which I am familiar with (Dutch, English, and
>German) also use the "s" suffix to form plurals.  My question is, is this
>altered inflection the result of the Germanic invasions and subsequent rule of
>Spain, or some other method of language shift?

The Germanic plural in -s is only one of many formations, most of which derive
from earlier stem formants when the earlier plural endings (similar to those in
Latin) were lost due to phonological processes related to the strong initial
accent.  In English, most other plural formations have been lost except in a
few words; that is not nearly so much the case in other Germanic languages.

So no, the -s plural in Spanish is unrelated to the -s plural in Germanic
languages.
-- 
Rich Alderson   You know the sort of thing that you can find in any dictionary
                of a strange language, and which so excites the amateur philo-
                logists, itching to derive one tongue from another that they
                know better: a word that is nearly the same in form and meaning
                as the corresponding word in English, or Latin, or Hebrew, or
                what not.
                                                --J. R. R. Tolkien,
alderson@netcom.com                               _The Notion Club Papers_
