Domino Quartz's Delightfully Quaint Random Banter Thread #248

[TaiLiu]

I will never go to Times Square to see the big ball drop on New Year's Eve ever again because there are no bathrooms at Times Square and I'm a veteran to see the big ball drop since 2006! 😫😫😫😫😫😫😫😫😫😫

That sucks. I hope you found a bathroom in the end. I've seen videos. It's so crowded there.

The history of the English language is not really my strict sense domain, but I can elaborate on the current consensus regarding these, I believe. You can't find this type of -t among standard suffixes and it is described as "unetymological" because it is understood not to be your classic derivational or inflectional affix, but rather an excrescent, an epenthetical sound that carries neither semantical nor morphological value and is believed to have entered the composition of these words for (at this point and as far as I can tell) obscure phonetical reasons. I'm inclined to suspect it might have spread further by analogy, but I cannot prove that offhandedly and I'm too lazy to look into possible modern examples.

Now, do mind that this is only the case for the adverbs. Irregular verb forms such as spelt have an entirely different origin. There, the -t is simply an archaic form of the Germanic dental tense/aspect marker and as such a proper inflectional suffix, which is much older than whatever altered the pronounciation of the adverbs (Old English versus Late Middle/Early Modern).

Thanks for the explanation. So people just started adding t suffixes and it stuck. Pretty cool.

Aside: In some countries, it's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird_Day! Happy bird day!

I'm quite confident in TaiLiu's ability to both parse it and to have foreseen I'll do this exact thing when requesting my opinion. Aside from that, "it does not carry meaning" is kind of important and the term excrescent useful for locating further reading into the subject if they want to delve in any.

I appreciated the response for sure.

I would translate the jargon as "the -t ending on adverbs doesn't have any actual meaning that linguists know of, so they assume it is there because some of the forms without it ('amids', 'amongs', etc) violated some habit or preference in the language-making part of English speakers in the 1500s, and once the '-st' form was established for some adverbs, it spread to others because people's brains want adverbs to sound adverby"

As there isn't much evidence to work with any explanation will be speculative, but I would put forth for consideration several facts:

-1: This seems to happen when the historical word is an preposition that was turned into an adverb by adding the genitive case suffix -s.

-2: Modern English doesn't retain case endings, but sometimes they are still around as baked-in parts of modern English words (consider for example amidships, and ponder why it isn't amidshipst).

-3: The word abreast looks like it follows the pattern but it doesn't, it derives from an + brest "on breast (i.e. side-by-side)".

-4: the seemingly meaningless addition of a word-final dental to a word that didn't historically have one also happens in some German words (e.g. axe/Axt, moon/Mond)

-5: The word against is unusual in that the -st version is the only acceptable one in most English dialects, except some like Scottish that never adopted it.

So the most interesting conclusion I have drawn is that when depicting Scottish or derivative accents in text form, "I nae be standin' again ye" is more correct than "I nae be standin' again' ye". (quick, somebody do an analysis of apostrophe placement in Durkon's speech so I can get back to serious linguistics in the real world :D)

I had no idea "amidships" was even a word till now. :O