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Thanks for your understanding.
Chris -- 2018-04-11
On this forum, we’ve had occasion to mention the backformations “pea” and “cherry,” both of which started out as singular words with a terminal “s” sound that was interpreted as a plural.
Yesterday I was walking through the orchard of Victoria’s Government House and came across a quince. Hadn’t seen one these for many a year-quinces are a sort of legacy fruit in modern gardens and orchards. In the course of looking up information on the tree, I noticed that the word “quince” may also be a backformation. But backformed in the opposite direction. The name of the fruit started out in English as “coyn.” The OED speculates that its use as a collective singular (“the coyn aren’t ripe yet”) led to a postfix “s” that was eventually interpreted as a singular.
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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Would have expected quinze or quinse , with the voiced z sound like pease has, if it began as a plural. (We don’t say bince as the plural of bin , and though bins is written with an s we pronounce that orthographic s as if it were z .) Any hint of a final nt ? ( Quints is practically if not absolutely identical in pronunciation to quince .)
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2020-08-26 11:03:30)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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I looked for the “nts” ending (i.e, “quints” in place of “quince”), but I couldn’t find many examples that were convincing slips. And the few I found were not likely to be eggcorns.
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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Right. I was meaning, is there evidence that coyn might ever have been pronounced coynt , as that would make the voicelessness of the -ce ending perfectly normal for a plural.
Last edited by DavidTuggy (2020-08-29 19:15:00)
*If the human mind were simple enough for us to understand,
we would be too simple-minded to understand it* .
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No evidence. Here are the OED spelling records:
ME quence, ME queynce, ME qvynce, ME qwyns, ME (16 Scottish) quense, ME–15 quynce, ME–15 quyns, ME–15 quynse, ME–15 qwince, ME– quince, 15 qwynce, 15–16 quinse.
Hatching new language, one eggcorn at a time.
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