Linguistics for fun and profit

The English language has 2 ways of forming the comparative/superlative. The first being to add er/est to the end of an adjective, and the second being to use more/most before the adjective. Generally speaking, short words get the first method, long words get the latter. (Click here for a more in depth explanation.) Good? Good.

But, wait a minute... Doesn't this seem incredibly arbitrary? I mean arbitrary even for English? So I started wondering if there might be some orthographic reason for the split. After all, English's long and convoluted history does often explain the illogical. Perhaps -er/est words are of Germanic origin and more/most words are of French? A brief list of adjectives indicates that this might be the case, although I have already found exceptions if so. Part of the problem with testing this hypothesis is that I don't have a good dictionary that includes the orthographies of words. Wheras Middle French and Middle English directly mingled, German's influence was much further back, so there are don't seem to be as many good cognates. This is also hampered by the fact that I don't speak German.

	French	Germanic	er/est	more/most
big	NO grand	maybe Gr:groß	YES	NO
little	NO petit	maybe Gr:klein	YES	NO
useful	probably utile	maybe Gr:nützlich	NO	YES
risky	YES risque	NO	YES	YES much more risky
interesting	YES intéressant	NO	NO	YES
popular	YES populaire	NO	NO	YES
difficult	YES difficile	NO	NO	YES
rich	YES riche	NO	YES	NO

However I haven't been able to find anything online to confirm or deny this theory. I would like to get back to the teacher who asked me that most fundamental and yet annoying of all questions: Why.

So, give me your thoughts, comments, suggestions. Pretty please?


Addendum in favor of my hypothesis:
French forms the comparative by inserting plus before the adjective and the superlative by inserting le plus. Once again, I don't speak German, a little googling makes it look like German does something more like -er/est.

Address

Several people have asked me for my current address, leading me to wonder, am I getting cards? Or better yet, presents? ;-) Without further ado

1850-3 oaza Kumano
Chikugo-shi, Fukuoka-ken 833-0055
JAPAN

Because this is, of course, a translation, there are several variations that will work. So don't panic if I've told you before and this is slightly different.

Fall foliage

This one's for my friend Lynn, who lives in Hawaii and misses Japan's 紅葉. I took all of these during a Yosakoi festival near Dazaifu. (info that will only make sense to Lynn: it's the one hosted my Ki-chan's husband's group.)

I'm not dead

Fall kind of sucked. It felt like one crisis after another. Also, I barely saw the light of day between working and studying for the dreaded Japanese Language Proficiency Test Level 1. But the test was last weekend, my hours have been cut back at work, and hopefully things are looking up. I have some pretty pics of fall foliage from a few weeks ago that I'll post real soon (no really, I will!).