VAXen [was RE: Do not call them PCMCIA Cards...]

[Rich Alderson]

> From: Liam Proven
> Sent: Friday, July 17, 2009 2:18 PM

> The -en ending is a feature from Anglo-Saxon Old English. The -x
> ending is a red herring.

> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_English

> In OE, nouns were divided into strong and weak. Strong nouns formed a
> regular plural - book/books, frog/frogs - weak ones had an irregular
> plural: cow/kine. Sometimes it was an ablaut, where just the vowel
> changes: mouse/mice, goose/geese. German does something similar:
> vogel/vögel ("bird"/"birds").

> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_English_morphology#Nouns

I just took at look at the Wrongipedia page to see whether the confusion
was Liam's or theirs.  It's theirs.

In Germanic grammar (as an academic subject), *strong* nouns are the ones
with different endings, or umlaut (goose/geese), or both.  I don't recall
any nouns forming a plural via ablaut (sing/sang/sung/song is an example
of ablaut in English).  *Weak* nouns are the ones with -en.

Historically, BTW, that -en was part of the *stem*, and the original
endings were lost in the transition from Proto-Indo-European to Proto-
Germanic.  Compare English oxen, German Ochsen, with Sanskrit uks.anas
(where the dot should be beneath the preceding <s>, indicating an "sh"-
like pronunciation).

> One of the irregular plurals is -en: ox/oxen, child/children, man/men,
> brother/brethren.

man/men is umlaut, like goose/geese.

> The hackish use of it for VAX, box, etc. is just intentional
> overgeneralisation: knowingly applying a specific rule in a
> non-specific case.
> http://dictionary.die.net/overgeneralization

> A possible origin, hints Wikipedia, is that it's a bunch of unrelated
> vaxes, but a cluster of vaxen.

> The Jargon File suggests this is by extension from "vixen", but not
> why... "Vixen" being a female fox; "fox" is a strong noun: fox/foxes.

The *original* Jargon File states that it's from "oxen", with the sound
*perhaps* helped along by "vixen".  It wouldn't surprise me that ESR
would ****^Wget that wrong, too.

> http://www.jargondb.org/glossary/vaxen

> But perhaps it's to denote interchangeability:
> http://foldoc.org/boxen


Rich Alderson
Vintage Computing Server Engineer
Vulcan, Inc.
505 5th Avenue S, Suite 900
Seattle, WA 98104

mailto:RichA at vulcan.com
(206) 342-2239
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http://www.pdpplanet.org/

...who has spent most of the last 4 decades doing Indo-European studies.