Plural Problems - Correction & another thought

["Raymond A. Brown" <raybrown@macline.co.uk>]

There was an error in my original reply to Padraic's mail.  My apologies.

At 16:11 5/11/97, Padraic Brown wrote:
>On Wed, 5 Nov 1997, Raymond A. Brown wrote:
[.......]
>> Presumably the plural ys & sa cause spirant mutation due to the lost h <--
>> s.  That might be enough, especially as verb endings also show a different,
>
>I haven't thought much about pronominal etymology and the actual reasons
>_why_ they lenite.  There's nothing in the list about personal pronouns
>causing lenition. If ys and sa are derived of Latin, then I suppose they
>could come either from hic-ipse/haec-ipse or ipse/ipsa or is/ea (or ipsa).
>(I'm not quite sure how to get rid of the c's and p's just yet.)

Sorry - slight mistake here. Late Latin isse is from ipse by assimilation
of -ps- --> -ss- and Italian esso, Spanish eso are derived from it; in the
earliest Romance forms from both ille & isse  compete for both definite
article & 3rd pers. pronouns. That's all correct.  But I made a mistake
about Brithening  :=(

I was remembering earlier posts with Andrew when IIRC he said he'd been
tempted to have ISSE survive as def. art. but opted in the end for ILLE.
The latter obviously is more likely, judging from other Romancelangs, but
the former is not impossible.

Brithening ys & sa are, of course, 3rd pers. pronouns.  The def.art. is
from ILLE.
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I had another look at the Brithenig pages today.  I see the plurals haven't
been changed.  And I've been thinking more.

The original thought was that final -s would change to an aspirate & then
disappear, except in the case of words like articles, pronouns, numerals
where it caused spirant mutation before disappearing.

Apart from the spirant mutation, this is what happened in medieval French,
giving the article & other determiners the job of marking plural in speech.
The vasr majority of nouns do not change for plural in _spoken_ French.
This would've been possible in Brithening if it hadn't developed the
distictive Brittonic 'genitive' construction, i.e. cas ill hof (house the
man) = 'the man's house' (cf. Welsh 'ty'r dyn', Breton 'ti an de^n').

If nouns do not inflect for plural we cannot distinguish between 'the man's
house' & 'the man's houses'; hence, it was suggested that there'd have been
a drive to mark plural even when the original plural endings had
disappeared, so the -n plural development which I suggested.  Now we can
distinguish 'cas ill hof' from 'casan ill hof'.

But, however much I like the Brittonic structure (found also in Arabic &
other Semitic langs, BTW), one must wonder if the Celtic influence would've
been strong enough for Brithenig to have developed this or whether
Brithenig would have followed its sister langs & used 'di' (<-- Latin de)
to denote possession, thus: lla gas di'll hof (la maison de l'homme).

In that case there'd be no problem with the disapperance of the plural
ending, just as there's no problem in spoken French. We'd have:
lla gas di'll hof - the man's house
lla chas di'll hof - the man's houses.

Just a thought.

Ray.