Re: file searching/vista help

["Patricia M. Godfrey" priscamg@xxxxxxxx]

Robert Holmgren wrote:
> > will-ye, nill-ye
>
> will I, nill I: "be I willing, be I unwilling", willingly or
> unwillingly, nolens volens.

Well, sure. But the second- and third-person forms are also
found. And the later willy-nilly covers all persons. The problem
is that I suspect that many people misinterpret "willy-nilly" to
mean "carelessly, sloppily, done `with the side of your foot'"
(as my mother used to say). So I, perhaps pedantically, tend to
use the older, person- and nmber-specific forms.
'Nolens volens' is interesting, being indeclinable (a rare thing
in Latin; cf. iusiurandum, which generations of students have
wished was indeclinable). Gender wouldn't show, since the two
participles are both declined like 3d declension adjectives,
where masculine and feminine are the same, but the number doesn't
change: if the subject of the main verb is plural ('reges
terrae', say) it stays 'nolens volens', not, as one might expect,
`nolentes volentes'.
But I wonder if the English will-nill forms were invented to
translate 'nolens volens' or if they're native. Do other
Indo-European languages have similar expressions? How about the
east IE ones (Sanskrit, Urdu, Persian) that weren't subject to
the influence of Latin, as the Germanic, romance (obviously), and
even Celtic, Baltic, and Salvic ones were?
--
Patricia M. Godfrey
priscamg@xxxxxxxx