To Have Corn.

Alex Foreman writes on Facebook that you’re not a real prescriptivist unless you believe that the past participle of choose should be corn. Quite right, but the very form “choose” is a despicable piece of illiteracy; the true heirs of Alfred the Great say I cheese in the present, I chess in the past, and I have corn when the participle is called for. And of course they use beech as the plural of book. If you do not do these things, stop whining at the rest of us for our lax usage.

Addendum. More FB Foreman:

A father and son arguing in a reconstruction of 15th century Eastern Norwegian. The father is rebuking his son for his lazy speech, including his merger of /θ/ with /t/

Þ-þ-þ-þak!

Comments

  1. Foreman’s post is sadly not public. How did Old English produce “corn” as the past participle?

  2. Proto-West Germanic:

    Infinitive *keusan
    1st sg. past *kaus
    3rd pl. past *kuʀun
    Past ptcple *koʀan

  3. Foreman’s post is sadly not public.

    I quoted the whole thing, so you’re not missing anything.

  4. tjusa
    Swedish

    Etymology
    From Old Swedish kiusa, from Old Norse kjósa, from Proto-Germanic *keusaną (“to taste, choose”), from Proto-Indo-European *ǵéwseti, from *ǵews- (“to taste, try”). Cognate to English choose. The spelling is unetymological and was changed in the 17th century. A modern spelling kjusa would otherwise be expected.
    Pronunciation
    IPA(key): /²ɕʉːsa/
    Rhymes: -²ʉːsa

    Verb
    tjusa (present tjusar, preterite tjusade, supine tjusat, imperative tjusa)

    1. to charm, enchant, fascinate
    2. to bewitch

    https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/tjusa

  5. Here’s an abbreviated list of OE forms from the 1889 OED entry:

    I. 1. present stem. †a. Old English ciose, céose, Middle English cése, cheose, chese ( chyese, chiese, chise, cheese, chees, chess, schese, Scottish cheyss, Middle English–1500s cheise). Obsolete.
    b. Middle English–1500s chose. Obsolete.
    c. 1500s– choose. The existing form.
    d. Middle English–1800s chuse archaic.

    II. past tense. 2. 1–3 person singular a. Old English céas, Middle English cheas, chæs, chēs (Middle English chees, chese, chess).
    b. Middle English chās, chaas, Middle English–1500s chase (Middle English chace, modern Scottish chaise).
    c. chose (the current form). [f. the plural.]

    3. 2nd person singular † Old English–Middle English cure, Middle English chure. (Afterwards fashioned on the 1–3 sing: now chosest.)

    4. plural a. Old English curon, Middle English curen. (So subjunctive)
    b. [< past participle.] Middle English chose(n, Middle English– chose.
    †c. [< singular chēs.] Middle English chesen, chese, ches ( chees, chess). Obsolete.
    †d. [< singular chās(e.] Middle English–1500s chase. Obsolete exc. Scottish.

    5. weak inflection. [< chese] Middle English chesid, -ed. 4–6 plural cheseden, -iden, chesden. Scottish chesit. [< chuse] Middle English–1700s chused. [< chose] 1500s chosed. [< choose] 1500s–1700s choosed.

    III. Past participle 6. strong. †a. coren, corn, koren, core. Obsolete.(More frequently ycore adj.)
    b. Middle English– chosen (Middle English -in, -yn, -un, etc.).
    c. [Shortened from b.] chose. Occasional in Middle English, but very frequent in 18th cent.

  6. Sure.

    But could someone give a word on when and why s and r might alternate? It seems strange at a glance. I’m vaguely aware of the idea of s being substituted for r in certain situations, which I can make some vague tongue-sense of if I speak a very rough r. But this seems like the opposite. Were r and s non-phonemic and spoken in a way that approximated each other at some point?

  7. The s/r alternation is due to Verner’s Law (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verner%27s_law which conveniently cites this very verb). Past-participle originally had stress after the s which voices it to z, with z to r being a later change. Modern Germanic languages have tended to regularise paradigms so that affected verbs have either s or r but not both; however German still has kiesen versus gekoren for the archaic cognate verb in this case.

    For the Middle English preterite, this verse will be familiar to many singers:
    I syng of a mayden
    þat is makeles,
    kyng of alle kynges
    to here sone she ches.

  8. Was/were is a convenient example that’s still in the language.

  9. Thanks!

  10. the true heirs of Alfred the Great say I cheese in the present, I chess in the past, and I have corn when the participle is called for.

    thou wost, m8?

  11. Trond Engen says

    cheese – chess – corn

    Why have I never known this? But I guess the parallel to leese – less – lorn should be obvious.

  12. David Marjanović says

    d. Middle English–1800s chuse archaic.

    But nigh indestructibly preserved, with several occurrences, in the big-C Constitution.

    with z to r being a later change

    And interestingly it happened independently in North and West Germanic. (But I have no idea why the Wikipedia reconstructions of Proto-West-Germanic contain “ʀ”. That’s a bad attempt to say something anachronistic.)

    German still has kiesen versus gekoren for the archaic cognate verb in this case

    …yes, theoretically – but that’s so archaic that hardly anyone knows it. Regularizing it by replacing the present with its erstwhile causative, küren, is already restricted to deliberate archaisms. The word in actual use for “choose, elect” is wählen.

    Was/were is a convenient example that’s still in the language.

    And funnily enough, German lost that one in the 17th century, turning the singular into war (2nd person warst).

  13. Trond Engen says

    A father and son arguing in a reconstruction of 15th century Eastern Norwegian

    I have linked to Arne Torp’s homepage before, most recently here, I think.

  14. German still has kiesen versus gekoren

    Not anymore; according to Paul’s Deutsches Wörterbuch kiesen was lost in the 17th century (although the classics – i.e. Goethe and Schiller – tried to revive it). All that is left in contemporary German is the (more or less archaic) (aus)erkoren and the related nouns Kurfürst.and Kür.

  15. >Why have I never known this? But I guess the parallel to leese – less – lorn should be obvious.

    Were you speaking about English or a Scandinavian language? It wasn’t obvious to this English speaker, but after checking, the root behind forlorn is leose.

  16. I have linked to Arne Torp’s homepage before, most recently here, I think.

    Alas:

    Beklager, siden du forsøkte å nå finnes ikke.

    Dersom du forsøkte å nå en personlig nettside på webtjeneren folk.uio.no, er denne nå lagt ned. Brukere som hadde personlige nettsider på folk.uio.no er oppfordret til å flytte innholdet til en ny tjener kalt folk.universitetetioslo.no. Om du ser denne meldingen, kan dette tyde på at denne brukeren ikke har flyttet.

  17. Trond Engen says

    Alas, indeed, but at least the videos are still on YouTube.

  18. @Trond Engen: Bare English lorn is archaic, and since it primarily appears in the compound forlorn (which looks like it could easily be a borrowing from another Germanic language), I had sort of assumed that lorn itself—while I knew it to be related to lose—was borrowed in that form somewhere else. It had not occurred to me that it was part of a s and r alternation paradigm in English.

  19. Trond Engen says

    For the record, the “obvious parallel” wasn’t obvious to me at all. I looked it up (through ‘forlorn’ and ‘lose’) and put together the paradigm for the comment.

  20. Is there a way reconstruct an etymon for “pose” and “porn”?

  21. “love-lorn” is another place it still shows up.

  22. Trond Engen says

    To piece, I pess, I have porn.

    Actually ‘freeze’ ought to belong here < frēosan. I suspect there’s an element of old dialect variation in the ab- or zusence of rhoticity.

  23. I believe the Caerar ancestors of Julius lost their initial r via some rule disallowing two r’s in such a setting. Maybe freeze/froze/frorn never happened for similar reasons.

    A paradigm linking pose and porn should also predict thighs/thorn.

  24. John Emerson says

    So corn is the participle of cheese? Food for thought!

    There are so many wonderful things in linguistics!

  25. Stu Clayton says

    All that is left in contemporary German is the (more or less archaic) (aus)erkoren and the related nouns Kurfürst.and Kür.

    “Archaic” is a bit misleading applied to the participle auserkoren in Germany German. You find it frequently in better-newspaper articles as a classy way of saying that someone has been ausgewählt as the recipient of some big-deal prize, position or perk. Even that can be cranked up to auserwählt. It reminds me of Trump wondering whether he is The Chosen One.

    Only the infinitive erkiesen has disappeared from common use. But I learned it decades ago, and still wheel it out on occasion to get a nervous laugh from learnèd natives. They’re not sure if I’m having them on, you see. What larks !

  26. David Eddyshaw says

    @Ryan:

    I gather that the etymology of the family name Caesar is unclear, but I suspect the -s- is simplified from -ss- after the long vowel/diphthong, as in causa from earlier caussa. At any rate, Latin has no block on -rVr-, cf furor, soror.

  27. PlasticPaddy says

    Could there be more of these, that have separated into distinct verbs in English? Compare (a)maze and mar, which both have meanings related to “disturb” in older contexts.

  28. cheese – chess – corn… leese – less – lorn

    Modern Standard Dutch still has verliezen, verloor, verloren, with grammatischer Wechsel more or less intact (mutatis mutandis, with the usual levelling within the past tense). For the verb kiezen “choose”, dictionaries still list the past participle gekoren as a (not yet fully?) outdated alternative for the analogical gekozen. In the past tense, forms with -r- for this verb seem to have lost currency earlier (now koos, pl. kozen, but formerly also koor, koren). Verkoren was the most common past participle of the compound verkiezen “prefer, choose” up through the 19th century (now most often verkiezen, verkoos, verkozen), according to the Woordenboek der Nederlandsche Taal.

    Is there a way reconstruct an etymon for “pose” and “porn”?

    Drasvi, that is hilarious! I will have to quote you in lectures on Verner’s Law.

  29. @Fancua: You mean “Thou wost, mVIII?”

  30. >the etymology of the family name Caesar is unclear,

    Thanks, DE. I did read what I’d written somewhere, but probably in a forum where the average level of linguistics understanding was nearer my own with no one to correct it. Sigh. After posting, I tried to track it down, and the closest I came was the wiki for the name, which suggests that the r replaced s in the rhotic Roman environment, which is the opposite of what I was saying could have prevented frorn.

    I still contend the sequence of r’s in frorn is weird-sounding in my dialect of the Germanic language, and by extrapolation all the rest, and that’s what prevented the form from developing. Surely my taste is widely shared. Another possibility is that unlike Siebert, they were giving consideration to future users of the language, and worried the orthography would make it difficult to distinguish “frorn” from “from” in future fonts.

    Caeremonia > ceremony is an interesting word, with no certain explanation for caere-.

  31. David Marjanović says

    MHG verliesen (in the opening stanzas of the Nibelungenlied) > modern verlieren “lose” after the participle verloren.

    Actually ‘freeze’ ought to belong here < frēosan. I suspect there’s an element of old dialect variation in the ab- or zusence of rhoticity.

    Yes and yes: frieren, fror, gefroren in German.

  32. J.W. Brewer says

    This doesn’t fit in this thread at all but I’ll just stick in here in case hat might think it warrants a thread of its own: a recent piece that I found interesting from Martin Haspelmath on the increasing abandonment among quote-unquote generativists of a belief that once seemed pretty core to the Chomskyan worldview: https://dlc.hypotheses.org/2481.

  33. I won’t make a post of it but I’m glad to hear it; it’s always good when criminals repent and madmen come to their senses.

  34. Stu Clayton says

    Is there a Koestler among them ? Can we look forward to The UGh That Failed, Darkness at Noam (Noamfinsternis in the original) etc ?

  35. David Eddyshaw says

    @JWB, Hat:

    Looks to me not so much a genuine repentence: more an assertion that the various claims that have been made in the past by generativists which have been clearly refuted are now revealed to have never really been part of the Theory in the first place at all. Thus the Theory can still command our absolute belief.

    An analogy which springs to mind is the

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Disappointment

  36. I remember now that the 1979 Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Fiend Folio* had a monster called the “forlarren”—an obvious play on forlorn and its cognate forms. The creature was the ill-fated offspring of greater devil and a nymph, and the forlarren were known for their dangerous unpredictability.

    * The Field Folio was unique among the early Advanced Dungeons & Dragons hardbacks in that its contents were overwhelming based on fan submissions to the British gaming magazine White Dwarf, rather than being written by E. Gary Gygax with the assistance of the TSR Hobbies staff. (In the 1970s, the publisher of White Dwarf, Games Workshop, had the rights to distribute Dungeons & Dragons products in the United Kingdom. The forlarren was one of a several monsters created by Ian Livingstone, one of the co-founders of Games Workshop.) The title of the book was chosen to parallel the name of the first AD&D hardback, the Monster Manual. After the covers of the AD&D books and other products were redesigned, there was a Monster Manual II published, but the externally produced Fiend Folio was not updated with the new design and was instead simply allowed to go out of print. (Part of the reason for not updating and reprinting the Fiend Folio was probably rights issues, which were awkwardly shared between Games Workshop and TSR, and which had already caused significant delays in getting the Fiend Folio released.)

  37. Latin has no block on -rVr-, cf furor, soror

    Not generally, but there appear to be sporadic cases of rhotacism possibly being blocked by a following /r/ — caesaries “head of hair” (whether or not related to the name of the moechus calvus), miser, and most famously rosa (a loanword, but one that would plausibly have predated rhotacism; Cicero helpfully relates that L. Papirius Crassus, dictator in 339 BC, was the first member of his family to use the R spelling, reminiscently of the character in Homer whose name (which I forget) was the same as his grandfather’s but with the old -ti- assibilated to -si-).

  38. Caeremonia > ceremony is an interesting word, with no certain explanation for caere-.

    It’s cairi. De Vaan thinks it’s probably linked to the second part of sincērus which he derives from an adj. kairos or kaisos “intact”: “this seems semantically very attractive, and formally, without problems”. He sees L. caelum and Gmc.*χaila- and OCS цѣлъ “whole” as possible cognates.

  39. David Marjanović says

    Caelum as “whole” fits with this surprisingly well…

  40. marie-lucie says

    ulr: Kurfürst

    So the Kurfürsten as in Berlin’s Kurfürstendamm were the Elector Princes (if that is the right title in English) ?

  41. marie-lucie says

    Merci! As in French Prince-Electeurs (perhaps the origin of the German title).

  42. marie-lucie says

    But perhaps I am mistaken: the TLFI only gives Grand Electeur or Electeur for the translation of the German title. (Few French citizens “elected” any higher-ups in those days).

  43. PlasticPaddy says
  44. @Xerîb: gekoren is definitely outdated in Dutch nowadays, but the old form is still visible in uitverkoren (like German auserkoren).

  45. Lars Mathiesen says

    FWIW, the Danish descendant of ON kjósa (kýss/kaus/kusu/korinn) is kåre, which is what a kurfyrste (< G) does to the emperor, but we also have kyse in the sense of ‘scare’ which kept the preterite køs dialectally at least until not so long ago. (This is adjacent to the Swedish tjusa = ‘charm’ in that magic was originally thought to be involved).

  46. It just occurred to me that the title of this post is the only place in English where you would use a reduced vowel in “have” in the phrase “have corn.”

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