Ups and Downs of Living Together

[Erik_the_Blue]

If I understand Wikipedia correctly, what we have here is an archaic singular informal second person prevocalic genitive pronoun. Mayhaps Wiktionary should be corrected.

[niltrias]

If I understand Wikipedia correctly, what we have here is an archaic singular informal second person prevocalic genitive pronoun. Mayhaps Wiktionary should be corrected.

No, no, I agree completely that that is what we have. (I would, however, refer to it as a determiner rather than a genitive pronoun, but that battle is being fought in the ivory towers as we speak, so either is fine.)
I'm just saying that what the sentence needs is not a archaic singular informal second person prevocalic genitive pronoun, but an archaic singular informal second person nominative pronoun. prevocalic or preconsonantal does not apply in this case, because unlike determiners, nominative pronouns do not have prevocalic/preconsonatal bifurcation.

[theTrav]

Wot does thine mean?

'Thine' is a singular second person prevocalic possessive determiner. Enough words for you?

Wot does singular mean?

[loftar]

(I would, however, refer to it as a determiner rather than a genitive pronoun, but that battle is being fought in the ivory towers as we speak, so either is fine.)

Do let to contribute to the further derangement of this thread (of course, to whatever degree any further topical movement of it can be said to be "deranging" depends, I guess, to the degree it can be said to have a topic anymore), by calling that distinction weird. In my linguistic model, it would seem that a "determiner" is a syntactical function, whereas "possessive pronoun" is a word-taxonomical category used of a word outside of any syntactical context. A cursory inspection of Wikipedia's entry on determiners seems to agree with my model (seeing how it lists cardinal numbers, articles, demonstrative pronouns &c. as determiners), but I guess I may be mistaken.

I'm just saying that what the sentence needs is not a archaic singular informal second person prevocalic genitive pronoun, but an archaic singular informal second person nominative pronoun. prevocalic or preconsonantal does not apply in this case, because unlike determiners, nominative pronouns do not have prevocalic/preconsonatal bifurcation.

Oh? Is "sharper than you wit" some kind of idiom of which I am not aware (I cannot obviously find any google hits on either it, nor on any archaic form of it)?

Either way, if it is as you say, wouldn't that mean that "wit" is the predicate of the phrase, and should be conjugated to the second person? I'm not terribly well versed in Middle English verb conjugations, but wouldn't it be "sharper than thou witst"? Otherwise, even if it should be a possessive pronoun/determiner, isn't it by all reasonable standards preconsonantal -- "sharper than thy wit"?

[niltrias]

Heyya, Loftar! I was kinda hoping you would get into this.

I'll respond in two parts, because the points you bring up are both fairly complicated, albeit for different reasons.
First, my quote that you referred to is the very reason that wikipedia is a poor source for information on the subject. In America, at least, there is still currently a strong debate on the taxonomical groupings of words, and the determiner is the enfant-terrible. You have two main and several small but vocal groups advocating different classifications of these words, so there is no consensus. Wikipedia shows a patchwork of many of these ideas, but can hardly be regarded as definitive when nothing in print is regarded as definitive except by its own adherents. The main problem behind this is that the argument is not a question of who is right or wrong, but which classification system is the most convinient to use.

Descriptive grammar adherents generally advocate the determiner class, splitting it into type I and type II determiners with type I being further broken into (in order of priority) possessives, demonstratives, and articles. Type II determiners include cardinal numbers and expressions such as "some of", "none of" and cardinal numbers ("2 of"). (Actually, cardinals are more complicated than that, but I'll leave it for now.

Prescriptive grammarians, and especially dictionaries, prefer to use the term possessive pronoun, precisely (as you said) because it allows for easier taxonomic categorization when presented without context.

I would not say that you are mistaken, I would say that there are two (or more) vehemently disagreeing schools of thought on this matter.

Kinda like Altaic languages. (Although I do agree that the pro-Altaic school is in the decided minority, I am a proponent.)

[niltrias]

Part II

"Sharper than your wit" was a beautiful example of the occasional ability of English to omit the subject and the be-verb without becoming an imperative. More often seen in questions, and prescriptively questionable, it is unquestionable a descriptively correct form seen even in high levels of formality. If you replace the subject and be-verb, it would read as "It is (was?) sharper than your wit." So yes, "wit" is safely in the predicate.

Sharper than thou wit would translate to modern English "Sharper than you wit", "Sharper than thine wit" is probably correct, although depending on pronunciation of "wi-" at that time, "thy wit" might also be correct. I'm not sure. I think you may have confused "wit" with a verb? in this sentence, it is a noun, and a *Ahem* possessive pronoun is needed.

However, I am a bit confused about thy comment on my quote. I was not referring to "Sharper than thine wit." but to "What dost thine mean?"

In modern English, this would be "what do you mean?" "You" is the agent of the sentence, and a pronoun, hence a nominative pronoun is required. "Dost" is both archaic and informal, so an archaic, informal nominative pronoun is needed to match the verb. The correct archaic informal nominative pronoun is "Thou", so the correct sentence would be "What dost thou mean?" although depending on century and local, "what do thou meanst?" is also arguably correct.

Although, if theTrav meant "What dost 'thine' mean?" we have a whole 'nother kettle of fish....

Sorry if this did not correctly answer your question, I was slightly confused by what you were referring to.

[Jackard]

Is that short and simple enough for you, or do you need something simpler?

You made a wall of text to describe how you thought moving into bottleneck wouldn't work but now you've changed your mind and you're unsure.

The level of detail was excessive.

As is the level in your subsequent post.

keep fighting the good fight

It would seem brevity is not highly regarded by this forum.

[niltrias]

Minimum words needed to explain the point. heh.

[Junkfist2]

What the hell happened here?

[niltrias]

Derailment.