Random Thoughts Thread

[Montmorency]

If the plural of goose is geese, is the plural of moose, meese?

https://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/...l-moose-meese/

tl;dr version is it entered the English language a few hundred years after the Old English changes of words like goose/geese.

A question I've had for years:

If the plural of mouse is mice, why isn't the plural of house hice?

From the OED:

OE. gós (pl. gés)
Narragansett moos (= Abenaki mus, Penobscot muns)

Moose is not a native English, or even (Indo)European word.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift

OE. mús fem. (pl. mýs)
The word for mouse used to sound like modern "moose", before u → ɑʊ.

Same with the word for house: OE. hús

The plural was in OE. hús, in 12th c. husas, huses, from 14th c. houses; also in various writers from c 1550, and still dialectally, housen, which is sometimes collective.

So why don't "mouse" and "house" have the same plural?

Well, in the case of the modern computer peripheral they can.

But actually in Old English the plurals of the two words were different to start, as you see above.

For "mice" it seems to go back to Proto-Germanic:

As a specific instance of this, in prehistoric Old English, a certain class of nouns was marked by an /i/ suffix in the (nominative) plural, but had no suffix in the (nominative) singular. A word like /muːs/ "mouse", for example, had a plural /muːsi/ "mice". After umlaut, the plural became pronounced [myːsi], where the long back vowel /uː/ was fronted, producing a new subphonemic front-rounded vowel [yː], which serves as a secondary indicator of plurality. Subsequent loss of final /i/, however, made /yː/ a phoneme and the primary indicator of plurality, leading to a distinction between /muːs/ "mouse" and /myːs/ "mice". In this case, the lost sound /i/ left a trace in the presence of /yː/; or equivalently, the distinction between singular and plural, formerly expressed through a suffix /i/, has been re-expressed using a different feature, namely the front-back distinction of the main vowel. This distinction survives in the modern forms "mouse" /maʊs/ and "mice" /maɪs/, although the specifics have been modified by the Great Vowel Shift.

Then what about house? As you see above, in Old English the singular and plural were identical. It's just that over time people added on the generic "-(e/a)s" English plural to help differentiate.

[Fragony]

From the OED:

OE. gós (pl. gés)
Narragansett moos (= Abenaki mus, Penobscot muns)

Moose is not a native English, or even (Indo)European word.


https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Vowel_Shift

OE. mús fem. (pl. mýs)
The word for mouse used to sound like modern "moose", before u → ɑʊ.

Same with the word for house: OE. hús



So why don't "mouse" and "house" have the same plural?

Well, in the case of the modern computer peripheral they can.

But actually in Old English the plurals of the two words were different to start, as you see above.

For "mice" it seems to go back to Proto-Germanic:



Then what about house? As you see above, in Old English the singular and plural were identical. It's just that over time people added on the generic "-(e/a)s" English plural to help differentiate.

Maybe people just didn't assume one has more then one house for a straighr plural to exist, with mice you do. Language is easy untill you start thinking about it, despite screwing up I can speak a few pretty decently for common use of them, not good but I get by. I naturally adopt these these things I think, it somehow makes sense

[Crandar]

Fun fact, in ancient Greek, mouse is called as μῦς (mys). Now, I suck at linguistics and I didn't even bother to check it out, but I guess there is probably a common Indo-European root for the Germanic and Greek versions.

[Fragony]

Ancient Greek and Latin are pretty similar, nobody really knows how they should be pronounced but they were probably pretty close to modern Germanic languages, some miscommunications led to phonetic hints, ceaser was probably pronounced as kaisar for example. There is an absolute lack of written down music from that period that should get us very far but there little to go on

[Crandar]

Are you sure about the uncertainty argument? As far as I know, there are even academics who sing the epic of Gilgamesh, despite the fact that Akkadian are more obscure than Greek or Latin.

At least in the Hellenistic period, the pronunciation of ancient Greek was similar to the modern version. An easy way, even for a non-expert, to notice this is the epigraphic and papyrological evidence.

Spelling mistakes increase dramatically, because the engravers and scribes, who weren't always very talented at grammar, couldn't discern the difference between υ, ι, η, ει, and oι or between ο and ω or between ε and αι.
Τhey sounded the same since the times of Seleucus, a fact that has created enormous problems for Greek pupils for 2.300 years.
Go to Facebook, follow Golden Dawn accounts who gloat about their links to Pericles and you will observe the exact same mistakes.

[Hooahguy]

I was supposed to have an interview at 10:00 this morning on Skype. My power randomly went out at 9:40. Just my luck. I rescheduled it for Wednesday though. Pretty bummed, this is my third interview with this company in DC and I was really looking forward to getting through it. This interview was to be with the team I would be working with. I'm trying not to get my hopes up too high, I've been burned before.

[Seamus Fermanagh]

I was supposed to have an interview at 10:00 this morning on Skype. My power randomly went out at 9:40. Just my luck. I rescheduled it for Wednesday though. Pretty bummed, this is my third interview with this company in DC and I was really looking forward to getting through it. This interview was to be with the team I would be working with. I'm trying not to get my hopes up too high, I've been burned before.

Most important interview of the set. These are the folk you will be "married" to at work. I love it when companies allow this type of interview, bespeaks a good interest in work group communication climate.

[Fragony]

Are you sure about the uncertainty argument? As far as I know, there are even academics who sing the epic of Gilgamesh, despite the fact that Akkadian are more obscure than Greek or Latin.

At least in the Hellenistic period, the pronunciation of ancient Greek was similar to the modern version. An easy way, even for a non-expert, to notice this is the epigraphic and papyrological evidence.

Spelling mistakes increase dramatically, because the engravers and scribes, who weren't always very talented at grammar, couldn't discern the difference between υ, ι, η, ει, and oι or between ο and ω or between ε and αι.
Τhey sounded the same since the times of Seleucus, a fact that has created enormous problems for Greek pupils for 2.300 years.
Go to Facebook, follow Golden Dawn accounts who gloat about their links to Pericles and you will observe the exact same mistakes.

I am quite sure about pronouncation being a mystery or at least mostly, never heard about the epic of Gilgamesh being sung maybe that is possible I guess but not just my guess, theirs as well, it's not a song it's poem with no melody I know of, but if they think there is power to them, I won't say they are full of it because I never heard of this before.

Spelling mistakes meh, make them all the time, I stopped trying to not make them, make more if I try not to make them

[Montmorency]

Are you sure about the uncertainty argument? As far as I know, there are even academics who sing the epic of Gilgamesh, despite the fact that Akkadian are more obscure than Greek or Latin.

At least in the Hellenistic period, the pronunciation of ancient Greek was similar to the modern version. An easy way, even for a non-expert, to notice this is the epigraphic and papyrological evidence.

Spelling mistakes increase dramatically, because the engravers and scribes, who weren't always very talented at grammar, couldn't discern the difference between υ, ι, η, ει, and oι or between ο and ω or between ε and αι.
Τhey sounded the same since the times of Seleucus, a fact that has created enormous problems for Greek pupils for 2.300 years.
Go to Facebook, follow Golden Dawn accounts who gloat about their links to Pericles and you will observe the exact same mistakes.

IIRC there is textual evidence from Late Antiquity (for Greek and Latin) where authors explicitly discuss how certain words or letters are supposed to sound, or more typically what mistakes they perceive there to be in contemporary pronunciation or spelling.

Also, across time and place we've dug up instructional tablets used in paideia.

[Fragony]

IIRC there is textual evidence from Late Antiquity (for Greek and Latin) where authors explicitly discuss how certain words or letters are supposed to sound, or more typically what mistakes they perceive there to be in contemporary pronunciation or spelling.

Yes that's true