Is there much theory of German plurals at all?
Or do you just have to look them up?
The Oxford/Duden let me down, presumably not having been written by a piper,
hence my mistake.
I think we can ignore the related but irrelevant meanings - if meaning affected
how plurals formed, languages would be very different things
John
-Original Message-
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Sent: 24 April 2007 09:24
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Cc: nsp@cs.dartmouth.edu
Subject: [NSP] Re: German word
Hartvig Körner wrote:
Theoretically,
the plural form would be die Bordunen
According to which theory? According to both Wildhagen and Harraps (the only
German dictionaries I happen to have at hand), Brockhaus and bagpipe.de it's
Bordune (except in the dative. All German plurals end in n in the dative.)
at http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bordun we find Bordun defined as:
1) an organ stop, 2) the lowest pitched in a set of bells,
and
3) einen während der gesamten Melodie oder signifikanter Teile eines
Musikstücks ausgehaltenen Begleitklang gleicher Tonhöhe [An accompanying sound
of constant pitch sustained throughout the entire melody or significant parts
of a piece of music] (in other words, a drone)
and last but not least:
4) umgangssprachlich auch die Bordunpfeifen und Bordunsaiten (siehe weiter
unten). [colloquially also the drone pipes and drone strings (see below for
further information)]
So, if we want to be pedantic, Bordun refers to the droning phenomenon and
the bit(s) of the instrument producing it is one Bordunpfeife or several
Bordunpfeifen (the n here is the plural in all grammatical cases, not just
the dative (German is complicated)).
I suppose strictly speaking it's the same in English ; drone pipes produce
the drone. So we call them drones for short.
To further complicate matters, some nouns in German can, but need not, add an
e in the dative singular - so we can find, at
http://www.mittelalter.de/shop/produktkatalog/Sackpfeifen,Sackpfeifen_32_produktkatalog_liste.html
, for example - mit 1 [einem] Bordune (dative after mit) [with one drone].
Very confusing, but correct.
So, to sum up:
It's one 'Bordun' (but can - but doesn't have to - be with, from, to etc.
one 'Bordune') and more than one 'Bordune' (but *must* be with, from, to
etc. more than one 'Bordunen').
And colloquially the word can be used to mean drone (hardware)
No prizes for guessing what I've been doing for a living since 1974 ;-)
HTH.
chirs
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