kine

CheriRD I find the definition of 'weasel' curious -- does anyone know how that came about? or have an example of its use? Nov 17, 2011

hernesheir cruggles: "a disease of young kine". --Dr. Jamieson's Scottish Dictionary and Supplement, 1841. Jun 1, 2011

qroqqa Actually the pronouns mine and thine do, but kine doesn't. The -ine is the Germanic form of the adjective ending more familiar from Latin-derived equine, porcine, etc. Greek also had it*; crystalline is the only English inheritance of this that I can recall.

Kine on the other hand is a double plural: first by umlaut alone, [ku:] becoming [ky:], then picking up the -n plural.

* Hm, apparently the -i- was short here, so perhaps not the same ending after all. Jun 1, 2011

ruzuzu Are there any others that follow the same pattern as swine? Jun 1, 2011

bilby "About him was a four-cornered cloth of purple, and an apple of gold was at each corner, and every one of the apples was of the value of an hundred kine. And there was precious gold of the value of three hundred kine upon his shoes, and upon his stirrups, from his knee to the tip of his toe."
- Thomas Bulfinch, 'Age of Fable'. Sep 19, 2009

yarb The kine are all dead and under 7 cubits
of snow. The antlery tribes are stuck numb in drifts.

Your duds freeze stiff as you stand by the elm log blaze.
Brazen knick-knacks from Brum burst asunder with cold.
Icicles crackle in uncombed hairies' beavers.
It's really really rotten to be Rhyphaean.

Oenophiles give you Grands Cru by weight, not volume,
cleaving the frozen Lafite with their tomahawks.

- Peter Reading, Englished (iii. 349-83), from Diplopic, 1983 Jun 30, 2008

bilby "Thus the cows create their own shade and food; and the tree, its hour-glass being inverted, lives a second life, as it were. It is an important question with some nowadays, whether you should trim young apple-trees as high as your nose or as high as your eyes. The ox trims them up as high as he can reach, and that is about the right height, I think. In spite of wandering kine and other adverse circumstance, that despised shrub, valued only by small birds as a covert and shelter from hawks, has its blossom-week at last, and in course of time its harvest, sincere, though small."
- Henry David Thoreau, 'Wild Apples'. Dec 13, 2007

uselessness Assuming that Hawaiian version is pronounced "kee nay"? Aug 10, 2007

oroboros "Da kine" is Hawaiian slang for "the best," "top flight," "creme de la creme" etc. Aug 10, 2007

uselessness Bizarre. I've never heard that before. Kine? Crazy. Aug 10, 2007

seanahan This follows the same pattern as swine. Aug 10, 2007

evin290 The only plural in the Enlgish language which doesn't share a single letter with its sigular form. :) (Plural for cow, by the way, Archaically.) Aug 9, 2007