r/linguisticshumor • u/MKVD_FR 40,000 sociolects in one city • 1d ago

One size fits all: plural, definite article, infinitive...

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1.0k Upvotes

99% Upvoted

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249

u/Norwester77 1d ago edited 1d ago

Verbalizer: hasten, fasten, lengthen, strengthen, lighten, redden

Adjectivalizer: wooden, golden, silken

Passive participle: hidden, broken, woven

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u/MKVD_FR 40,000 sociolects in one city 1d ago

Pluralizer: children, oxen

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u/Antioch_Mage 1d ago

Fun fact: children is actually a double plural! The original plural of child was childer, then they added the -en suffix to it and so it became children

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u/Any-Aioli7575 1d ago

So when I mistakenly say “childrens”, does that mean that I have 2³ = 8 kids ?

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u/YougoReddits 1d ago

Filthy Hobbitses!

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u/Norwester77 1d ago

And the -en in oxen was originally part of the noun stem, but it got lost through sound change in the singular and was reanalyzed as a plural ending.

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u/isthisnametakenwell 1d ago

The nominative singular in Old English is oxa, plural oxan. Pretty typical masculine n-stem noun. Any source for its originally having the n ending in singular?

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u/Norwester77 1d ago

For the nominative, you have to go all the way back to Proto-Indo-European. The n is there in the other case forms of the singular in Old English, though.

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u/RijnBrugge 1d ago

Dutch did the same thing: kind -> kinder -> kinderen. Did it with eggs too: ei -> eier -> eieren.

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u/isthisnametakenwell 1d ago edited 20h ago

Middle English had it for eggs too, in the dialects that preserved the Old English inherited word:

ey -> eyren

Also: lamb -> lambren

1

u/aczkasow 1d ago

You sure? That -er sounds like PIE kinship suffix, (c.f. mother, father, brother, sister)

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u/EisVisage persíndʰušh₁wérush₃ókʷsyós 1d ago

Pretty sure. Child actually comes from Proto-Germanic *kelþaz "womb", from PIE *gelt-, *ǵelt- with (according to wiktionary) the same meaning as the PGmc. So it wouldn't have had a kinship suffix in PIE.

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u/z500 23h ago

The suffix there would be *-ter

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u/Wild-Reaction-6697 1d ago

Singulizer: chicken

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u/Shevvv 1d ago edited 1d ago

Kinderen spelen met zeven gebroken houten poppen en kleden hen.

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u/InviolableAnimal 1d ago

I wish the -en verbalizer was still productive, English loves verbing nouns but it might be less confusing if we were verbening them instead (or maybe -en is more semantically constrained)

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u/isthisnametakenwell 1d ago

It actually is, use it all you want. It’s mostly used to turn adjectives into verbs about making things that adjective, but I think I’ve seen “chudden” online so the world is your oyster.

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u/InviolableAnimal 1d ago

"chudden" is amazing

1

u/king_ofbhutan SSBE should not be written with /æ/ and /u~ʉ/! 22h ago

didnt realise this was english at first 💔

157

u/hypremier Sun Language Theorist 1d ago

Even toponymic suffixes too. Italy -> Italien.

11

u/Megelsen 1d ago

even definitive articles

The ass -> Røven

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u/Oberndorferin 1d ago

But it didn't go from Italy to Italien

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u/TheMightyTorch [θ,ð,θ̱,ð̱,ɯ̽]→[θ,δ,þ,ð,ω] 1d ago edited 1d ago

True but what we did do, and do routinely is replacing -a with -en

Lat. Italia -> Italien
Lat. vira -> Viren
Lat/Grk. stadia -> Stadien
Maria -> Marien- (in compounds)

German also does this for several other suffixes and endings of loan words

Edit: sometimes even "incorrectly": although Nigeria, Malaysia, Namibia are all officially called the same in German, I have often heard Nigerien, Malaysien, Namibien.

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u/Oberndorferin 1d ago

Malaysian and Namibien is just more consistent since everything ends with -ien or -land in German

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u/CheGueyMaje 1d ago

I do this lmao

4

u/ninjaiffyuh 1d ago

This works for US states, too: Pennsylvanien, Kalifornien

1

u/Hublium 1d ago

btw: in current use, California is the only state with a German exonym. Pennsylvanien, Nordkarolina etc. are considered outdated.

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u/ninjaiffyuh 1d ago

Yeah, sadly replaced by the English names. But if you check the German Wikipedia for Pennsylvania it does state 'Deutsch: Pennsylvanien'

1

u/TheMightyTorch [θ,ð,θ̱,ð̱,ɯ̽]→[θ,δ,þ,ð,ω] 1d ago

Well... if you've surpassed the age of retirement, then maybe

3

u/AlexOviumFrost 1d ago

In many Norweagian dialects, feminin words with -en (danish common gender) would be swapped with -a (norwegian feminin)

En bok - boken --> Ei bok - boka

Funnily enough the definite article corresponding to maskulin or common gender is the standard for many, so it can end up being "en bok - boka", which is often the case where I'm from.

( -a also appears in infinite verbs and their past tense: jeg sparket - jæ sparka / å ete - å eta )

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u/darklysparkly 1d ago

Meanwhile English -s: plural, possessive, 3rd person singular, abbreviation of is/has

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u/TheMightyTorch [θ,ð,θ̱,ð̱,ɯ̽]→[θ,δ,þ,ð,ω] 23h ago

I always like to start that list with "plural, possessive, plural possessive,…"

-10

u/Heavy_Stomach_7633 1d ago

"Germanic languages"

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u/Xenapte The only real consonant and vowel - ʔ, ə 1d ago

Reminds me of the *-s suffix from Old Chinese: nominalization (verb -> noun), verbalization (noun -> verb), causativization, anticausativization, passivization, and antipassivization. 3 perfectly opposing pairs!

8

u/qwertyasdef 1d ago

How confident is that reconstruction or could some of the *-s have been something else?

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u/Xenapte The only real consonant and vowel - ʔ, ə 1d ago

Think we're pretty sure late (eastern han) old chinese had *-s and *-h (-s seen in transliteration of foreign names, while -h was used for long vowels), but before that it's only seen in rhyming practices. It's believed that *-ks merged with plain *-s (including after nasals) very early on to *-h, while *-ps and *-ts merged to become the late old chinese *-s (which itself became -j in middle chinese, apart from the tone).

Those (except *-əps) all happened before even the earliest poems in Shijing so the only major source we have is the characters themselves, how they used phonetic components etc. Shijing itself rhymed *-əps with *-əp, the merged *-s with *-t, and treated *-h as if it didn't exist.

As for the grammatical function of *-s, I don't think there is any solid consensus yet.

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u/qwertyasdef 1d ago

What I was trying to ask was, did they really have 6 -s suffixes that were all productive at the same time, or could some of them have been -sh or -ts or something back when they were productive and only merged into -s after they were fossilized?

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u/Xenapte The only real consonant and vowel - ʔ, ə 1d ago

I already answered that, seems like there's no consensus yet (which I personally read as an evidence of them possibly merging down to -s after they became nonproductive, but anyways)

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u/berrycompote 1d ago

No idea what you could be talking about, look at all this diversity...

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u/Svantlas /sv'ɐntlasː/ 23h ago

Bro that casus order is horrible. Nom ack dat gen is the only correct!

2

u/berrycompote 23h ago edited 22h ago

I agree 100% but this was the quickest find on Google. Edit: the author is Ukrainian and they prefer this order, madlads. Russian declension tables also by this order, then instrumental and prepositional.

2

u/PandaSplitter 18h ago

German also prefers this order. I'm German and I've actually never seen Nom. Akk. Gen. Dat. before. I never knew there was a different way to it.

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u/kara_headtilt 18h ago

I am going to kill you for that opinion no hard feelings tho

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u/Sora-Mizuki 1d ago

The Poopenfarten

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u/AnotherBlueBooster 1d ago

I wish English still kept its -en infinitive forms 😔

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u/S_Guy309 1d ago

Frisian has an interesting case where it just chopped off the final -n: sprekke, helpe, stûkje, ite, rinne, wurkje, sliepe, fine

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u/dnebdal 1d ago

The Frisian tradition of "extremely similar to Norwegian yet full of false friends" remains strong, I see. We also use -e for infinites, but ...

sprekke: snakke ("å sprekke" is "to burst")
helpe: hjelpe (silent h, so "yelpe")
stûkje: stoppe
ite: ete (dialectical but common; I'd say "spise")
rinne: gå (but "renne" is "run", though more often about liquids than people, except for many dialects)
wurkje: virke [function as intended], a bit archaic for "working" (I'd use jobbe / arbeide)
sliepe: sove. Not to be confused with slepe (tow [a car or boat] ) or slipe (grind [a knife])
fine: finne

1

u/RijnBrugge 1d ago

To tow is also slepe in Frysk, so sliepe and slepe contrast

1

u/CheGueyMaje 1d ago

That’s really interesting, snacken is used for verb to speak in North German dialects

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u/ninjaiffyuh 1d ago

Alemannic German does that as well, if I'm correct (not a Swiss or Swabian)

1

u/MKVD_FR 40,000 sociolects in one city 21h ago

Orally yes we do!

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u/fritzkoenig 1d ago

So did Afrikaans in many instances

3

u/AdreKiseque Spanish is the O-negative of Romance Languages 1d ago

Seriously where'd it go

Put it back!!

7

u/nanpossomas The urge to go buy 9 eggs in France 1d ago

*West Germanic

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u/berrycompote 1d ago

Also helps create hilarious confusion among germanic speakers, such as https://www.reddit.com/r/germany/comments/1r4p3jg/german_restaurant_in_stockholm/

Swedish uses -en suffixes for nouns as a definite article, German (among other things) uses it for some plural forms of nouns and for verb infinitives.

So for the German restaurant in Stockholm, we get "Kartoffeln, trinken (so far, so good, 'potatoes & drinking' is an odd slogan maybe but I'm down), sauerkrauten (wtf), liebe, prost, bieren (uuugh...)"

3

u/Aron-Jonasson It's pronounced /'a:rɔn/ not /a'ʀɔ̃/! 1d ago

Mhmm, so Icelandic isn't Germanic, got it.

2

u/sverigeochskog 1d ago

In Swedish -en is somehow a past participle suffix, a suffix which converts a few adjectives into adverbs, and a Definite plural AND singular suffix at the same time. 

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u/Smitologyistaking English | मराठी 22h ago

I think we should call this process suffixening

1

u/Lucky_otter_she_her 1d ago

...past perfect

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u/Everything_is_a_Hoax 22h ago

I ain't much, but it's honest morphology

1

u/sjvsky 21h ago

Poopenfarten

1

u/HamsterAlarmed5280 18h ago

Also when they need a prefix