Drive up ATM's OT, OOP (was Re: [Sca-cooks] Re: Languages)

[Daniel Myers]

Quoted from Philip & Susan Troy - 5/22/02, 7:21 AM -0400:
>Also sprach Daniel Myers:
>>A perfect example of back derivation is the word "pea".  In period, the
>>word "pease" was introduced into English (from French, I think) as a
>>partitive noun (like butter - you can have "some butter" but you can't have
>>"a butter".
>
>You can't? We have butter, apple butter, almond butter, cashew
>butter, cocoa butter, beurre blanc, clarified butter etc. Isn't one
>of them "a butter"? Isn't "a butter" acceptable as a shorter
>alternative to "one of several types of butter"? I admit it would be
>a stretch if all the non-standard butters were pseudo-butters, like
>apple butter, but that's not the case.

When saying "apple butter is a butter" there is an implicit concept there
that is left unspoken, such as "apple butter is a [type] of butter".  When
offering a spoonful of apple butter you still don't say "have an apple
butter" but instead say "have some apple butter".  Another way to look at
the division between partitives and regular nouns is to see if you can
leave the article "a" out.  "I have to go buy butter" sounds like a
perfectly normal sentence, but "I have to go buy car" sounds like something
Tarzan would say.

>>  This was because peas were served essentially like a
>>porridge).  To the ear of English speakers though, the word "pease" sounds
>>like a plural noun, so they started referring to the individual item within
>>the pod as "a pea".
>>
>>There.  I managed to work it around to a period topic after all.
>
>Ah. You mean "pant" used as a noun, to denote a single garment
>covering the legs, abdomen, and buttocks. Plural is "pants". That's a
>biggie in mail-order catalogues, L.L. Bean, places like that.

Yes, in a way.  The plural form and the phrase "pair of pants" is due to
the fact that the term was originally applied to hose (chausses) - one
individual piece of which was a "pant", and of course came in pairs, but
when styles changed and the separate pieces became one garment the plural
was kept out of habit.  Now that the origin of "pants" has been mostly
forgotten the singular form is no longer useful and has been back derived
and applied with a new meaning.

Another example is the word "port" which is a root in words like
"transport", "import", and "export".  It has a meaning as a verb (separate
from it's meaning as a noun) of "to move something", but this meaning was
not present in modern English (I'm not sure if it ever was).  Then computer
geeks got tired of talking about "exporting code from one platform and
importing it to another" and back derived (or revived) the original meaning
so they could "port the code from one platform to the other".


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 Edouard Who Is Not 'Lainie's Edouard (Daniel Myers)
 I BELIEVE! http://www.bookofrefreshments.com
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