Re: file searching/vista help

["Patricia M. Godfrey" priscamg@xxxxxxxx]

Bill Troop wrote:
> Do we think less of Shakespeare because he was on one occasion careless
> with this word?

Maybe he wasn't. Shakespeare did not hesitate to create
characters who misused words and the English language. Think of
Holofernes and Dogberry. And Fluellen is a Welshman, who
definitely is depicted as speaking with an accent. Of course, he
is also depicted as a bookish, if not necessarily learned, man,
given to citing the best authors, IIRC. So this might have been a
deliberate, in-character gaffe on Shakespeare's part.
>For that matter, why does Am Her remain the one major
dictionary >to investigate Proto-Indo-European roots?
Just possibly because scholars are suspecting that it's quite
difficult to reconstruct PIE. I recall a co-worker, of Lithuanian
extraction, telling me that Lithuanian was the closest modern
language to PIE, and that was why the OED (the 1933 ed., which
despite its descriptivist principles remained stanchly
prescriptivist in practice) so often cited Lith. in the
etymologies. I don't necessarily believe her, but...

--
Patricia M. Godfrey
priscamg@xxxxxxxx