On Nov 23, 2012, at 8:48 AM, Joel C. Ewing <[email protected]> wrote: > Which was exactly the point of the original Lindy post. "Deer" in English > evolved from a change in pronunciation of the Germanic "tier", but after the > passage of time the meaning of "deer" in English no longer matched the > meaning of the the foreign word from which it is derived. Llindy was never > attempting to claim that today's translation of the words cited matched the > original counterparts - quite the opposite. That was the whole point!
Just to be clear, there was no borrowing here. English and German (and Dutch and Frisian) have a common ancestor, and English "deer" and German "tier" descend from the same word in that common ancestor. The change from an initial voiced "d" to unvoiced "t" occurred in High German; in this case, the English pronunciation is closer to the original. (Of course there are other words where German retains the older pronunciation.) The word's original meaning was "an undomesticated animal", and it has retained this meaning in German, while in English it has been narrowed to members of the Corvidae family. Even in English this narrowing is relatively recent; there's a line somewhere in Shakespeare about "mice and other small deer." -- Curtis Pew ([email protected]) ITS Systems Core The University of Texas at Austin ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
