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[god_of_belac]

Linguists on my flist, help

Comments

[sildra]

Well, my vague memory of Old English is that it came from an -es genitive ending on Old English nouns. Also that declensions are the first things to go when languages borrow words (especially properly-used declensions), so the explanation that it came from Latin would seem pretty far-fetched. But, I'm not a linguist--I'm just avoiding work.

[aryky]

I can't give you a citation for the actual original use of the apostrophe, but the magic sheet helpfully shows the -es genitive form in Old English, if you want to show that to your opponent. Also, I don't know if it's just you or your opponent making a typo, but -es wasn't a genitive ending on Latin 3rd declension words (it was a plural nominative and accusative ending). I assume you or he is thinking of -is.

[ultranurd]

I think this was mentioned in Trask... I'll check my copy when I get home.

[tirerim]

I can't seem to find it there, but skimming through has reminded me why I love Trask: he produces sentences like, "Chief among the opponents of the Neogrammarians was the German linguis Hugo Schuchardt, who, though born in the engagingly named German town of Batman, spent his whole career at Graz in Austria."

[ultranurd]

I might have been thinking of the -lich -> -ly example?

[tirerim]

Check out http://www.llc.manchester.ac.uk/research/projects/possessives/context/

Also, the Proto-Indo-European genitive ending was *-syo (Pyles and Algeo. The Origins and Development of the English Language, 4th ed. p. 80), suggesting that this held over into the Germanic languages (and possibly even into Latin as well, but not into the second declension, at least-the given example is PIE *ekwosyo -> Latin equi (and Old English eos)).

[tirerim]

Or *-es in some cases; according to Trask (Historical Linguistics, p. 237), PIE *pedés -> Latin pedis, which is third declension. The Old English form, though not mentioned in the book, would have been 'fotes', which is actually cognate. So I can't find an attestation, but I think it highly likely that this is something that survives from PIE in a number of daughter branches; it's also found in Greek podós and Sanskrit padás.

[sildra]

Umm... it's been a long time since I studied any Greek, but I think the genitive would be podou (that is, assuming the nominative is podos).

[tirerim]

The nominative is poús, as in octopoús.

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