Discussions about eggcorns and related topics
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Thanks for your understanding.
Chris -- 2018-04-11
For “O ye of little faith,” obviously. It’s not particularly colorful, but… eggcorn?
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ecs wrote:
For “O ye of little faith,” obviously. It’s not particularly colorful…
Agreed.
...but… eggcorn?
I’d say so.
And welcome to the Eggcorn Forum, ecs!
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Well, maybe … But ye have N constructions were perfectly grammatical as well when ye of N constructions were, and they are pretty systematically closely related semantically to the point of being synonymous. E.g. Mark 5.40 in King Jimmy: “And he said unto them, why are ye so fearful? how is it that ye have little faith?â€
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What bugs me is how people use the ye/you forms in such contexts with (apparently) no awareness that they were plurals. Thou hast little faith, my friend , or Ye have little faith, my friends , but not the way it was done above! Of course most of the time people only mean it jocularly anyway, so I suppose just letting it slide would be better, but it is irritating.
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2015-12-06 13:45:48)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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This is embarrassing. I took at face value this page I found via a search engine; but that’s not Mark 5.40 in King James or any other version. (Mark 5.40 reads: “And they laughed him to scorn. But when he had put them all out, he taketh the father and the mother of the damsel, and them that were with him, and entereth in where the damsel was lying.†The intended verse was surely Mark 4.40, but even that is crucially different in KJ: “And he said unto them, Why are ye so fearful? how is it that ye have no faith?†The best-supported Greek text is more like “Don’t you (pl.) have faith yet?â€, though KJV was straightforwardly following the Textus Receptus.) Anyhow, it niggled at my mind, so I rechecked, and low and beheld … .
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The quote that I proffered as a counterexample, then, might be an example of the very error (eggcornish or not) that ecs was talking about.
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Sorry about that!
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The point still stands, however, that a ye have little N construction was perfectly reasonable at the time and would not need to be eggcorned off a ye of little N construction to be used. Or, for that matter, to be used even now by those of us who have that dialect as one of our partial competencies.
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2015-12-06 13:47:35)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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Thanks for the welcome and the research! To clarify, I never thought ‘ye have’ was ungrammatical. Also, I was surprised to read your comment that ‘ye’ couldn’t be singular; I googled just now, and appears that ‘ye’ was in fact used in the singular in Middle English and later, to mark respect/formality, as with the French ‘vous.’ (Here’s one citation: http://homes.chass.utoronto.ca/~cpercy/ … Malton.htm .) But my speaker thoughtfully added ‘my friend,’ so we know it wasn’t a ‘vous.’
The example that came to mind that led me to google the singular/plural thing was ‘Baa, baa, black sheep, have ye any wool’; but then again, ‘sheep’ doesn’t do much to settle questions of number. Who knows how many are being addressed here? Perhaps a whole flock of sheep choruses,”Yes sir, yes sir, three bags full.” Of course, we know from the ‘sir’ that these aren’t, like, buddy sheep. So it could still be a formal singular. Then we get to “One for my master, one for my dame,” etc.; but the ‘my’ doesn’t completely rule out plural sheep, because the speaker could be the representative of the feudal flock.
...I just googled the nursery rhyme itself, and the original text is actually ‘Have you any wool.’ According to my cursory search, ‘Have ye any wool’ appears primarily on contemporary cross-stitched samplers and hooked rugs. Artifacts of nostalgia for an unremembered antiquity are perhaps not the most reliable guides to period pronoun usage.
So, you know, never mind. But I’m not about to let a whole discourse on “Baa baa black sheep” go to waste, so I’m leaving it.
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Yes, the fact that “ye have little faith” is grammatical and makes sense points to the likelihood that it could simply be a non-eggcornish usage that’s valid in its own right, but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t be an eggcorn from “ye of little faith” in some cases. As usual with this sort of thing, it’d be hard to verify eggcornicity in any specific case short of a confession by the perp.
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Well, and that confession would have to confirm that this is the only standard phrase for the perp(s) (i.e. that they don’t have both ye of little faith and ye have little faith established.) Without that, we are in the situation where every time you mishear something that makes sense for something else that makes sense (which happens a lot), you’d call it an eggcorn. This morning my wife said something (can’t quite remember what) using the word fourteen , and I thought she’d said something about four beans , which somehow (can’t quite remember how) fit the context, albeit a bit badly. I don’t think any of us would want to count that as an eggcorn.
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In other words, it isn’t an eggcorn unless the acorn is missing as well as the putative eggcorn being present, established in place of the acorn in the speaker’s mind.
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2015-12-06 18:57:09)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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