steven@boring.UUCP (06/17/85)
In article <707@mcvax.UUCP> aeb@mcvax.UUCP (Andries Brouwer) writes (about the claim that chicken is a plural of chick): > A nice theory, but I don't believe it. "Chicken" has developed quite > regularly from Old English "cycen". Yes, it looks like you're right; my information came from Jespersen (no less) and a seventeenth century grammarian, John Wallis, who said "those who say chicken in the singular, and chickens in the plural are completely wrong". However, the OED does have several examples of chicken being used as a plural, and says that it is still a dialectical use. Presumably, this formation was the reverse of what I first suggested. With regards to surviving -en plurals in English, 'kine' turns out to be a fourth, along with oxen, bretheren, and children. An interesting point is that three of these four are double plurals: kine is the plural of ky, which was already a plural of cow, bretheren of brether, a plural of brother, and children of childer, a plural of child. > It may be that an English example is found in sow/swine. Probably not, for as Lambert Meertens pointed out to me, then you're stuck with explaining the relationship of sow/swine with Dutch zeug/zwijn. The OED suggests a suffix -ino- here. A different point: where there are separate words for the male and female of an animal, sometimes the male is used as a generic (eg, dog) sometimes the female (eg chicken) and sometimes there is a a separate generic (eg swine/boar/sow). Anybody got any background on this: relative frequencies, reasons for the differences, the situation in other languages? Steven Pemberton, CWI, Amsterdam; steven@mcvax.