Loss of Mid in English: Free Peasantry and Their Linguistic Advantage
onlinelibrary.wiley.com
onlinelibrary.wiley.com
In any case, the replacement of MID with WID (bringing with it some elements of 'against') explains some linguistic quirks I have noticed as a speaker of both English and German as to the differences between 'mit' (German) and 'with' (English), one of which is that 'mit' is not used to denote opposition ('gegen'='against' is used instead), while 'with' can be used that way.
KARL. Hast du ihn drauf, wie ich dir anbefahl,
Zum Kampf mit mir gefodert auf der Brücke
Zu Montereau, allwo sein Vater fiel?
Karl: "Did you then, as I bade you,
Demand him to fight me on the bridge,
Of Montereau, where too his father fell?"
Schiller is otherwise using very archaic and/or dialectal language (anbefehlen, fodern, allwo) and yet "Kampf mit" (evidently referring to a duel, not some kind of fight together against a third party) already makes an appearance.
Of course we have writings and written accounts of speech to reference. But there is plenty of that! Fortunately.
And current linguistic traditions can tell us where various groups ended up, a little more data. But very indirect.
The first group of views... pins down the disappearance of MID as the need to eliminate excessive expressions and redundant synonyms under MID's competition with WIÐ in the collocational phrases.
The second group of views ... establishes a push chain and a drag chain movement between the three prepositions: MID, WIÐ and AGAINST.
The third group... observes the cognitive advantage of spatial sense in the survival of prepositions and explains WIÐ's victory over MID...
And concludes its introduction with:
All three camps of opinions were confined to theoretical hypotheses lacking a quantitative approach, nor was due attention paid to the grand sociolinguistic backdrop of the English feudal society. Therefore, this paper aims to build on the previous research by introducing linguistic data based on quantitative methods, as well as connecting the change to the grander socioeconomic background of the medieval society.
English has a special way of changing meaning - so words like "meat", "deer", "foul" and "hound" originally meant something like any "food", any "animal", any "bird" and any "dog".
"With" originally meant something closer to "against," whereas "mid" was closer to "with" in today's English.
Over time, "with" changed meanings, we gained the word "against" and "mid" survives in fossil form in words like "midwife."
(Asking as a Norwegian, since “ved” is “by” or “beside”)
> if an outfit is described as “mid”, the implication is that the outfit is bad and the person should not be wearing it.
I'd say most people on the Internet have been conditioned since childhood to deliver and expect "white lies" on such topics. The actual mid-tier/average outfit is indicated by nonspecific reactions such as "you look great!". Saying "this looks average" is pretty much an insult. Greatness, or extreme badness, are communicated by expending extra effort on description, delivery or acts surrounding it. Similar phenomenon applies to pretty much anything involving descriptions of individuals or their choices.
In the extreme, you get the supposed[0] German way of doing employee references, where a reference is never in any way negative, but if it looks ordinary, like "Person X is never late", it is to be mentally prefixed with "Literally the only good thing we can say about them is that...".
This kind of heavily biased distribution of scales seems to be a wider thing in general. Obvious examples are all kinds of star ratings on-line: in e-commerce, in app stores, delivery services, restaurants, etc.: 5 stars out of 5 is "good", 4 stars is "meh", anything below is strictly negative.
From my own life, I remember one pre-internet case: school grades. On a scale of 1-5, with 6 being awarded for extraordinary achievements, the actual scale - as perceived by teachers, parents and students - was: 1-3 = various shades of bad; 4 = meh/average; 5 = what parents expect you should be getting by default; 6 = what parents expect you to get if you show minimum effort.
--
[0] - Something I've read about multiple times on HN.
Somewhat counterintuitively, historical evidence shows that most sound changes are regular! Which means they affect all words satisfying the same condition in the same way [0]. Irregular sound changes still occur, but if you look at the history of a language, regular sound change suffices to explain almost all developments.
Focussing on the history of English (which is very well documented, e.g. [1]) shows this well. Consonantal changes tend to be very regular: for instance, final /ŋɡ/→/ŋ/ in most dialects. English has an unusually complex vowel system, so vocalic changes tend to be somewhat more chaotic, but still show regularity: e.g. /a/ regularly turned into either /æ/ or /ɑ/.
(See also @canjobear’s comment, which makes the same point in a nice way: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36758576)
[0] This is the ‘Neogrammarian hypothesis’: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neogrammarian
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_Englis...
You're basically arguing for a rare and poorly understood kind of lexical change with no evidence to support it, against a well-understood and very common kind of change with multiple different strands of converging evidence.
It's not impossible that the phonological similarity of "mid" and "with" made it easier for the meanings to coalesce in "with". But it is certain, at least as certain as you can get in historical linguistics, that these were originally two prepositions with independent origins.
with: from Proto-Indo-European *wi-tero-s, from *wi ("apart") + *-teros
mid: from Proto-Indo-European *meth₂, from *me ("with")much like when football referees slow down a tackle using VAR and lose the real sense of power of the challenge, when you slowly and academically look at written examples of words, you lose the sense of how the words are actually used in practice. conjunctive words like mid and with are almost exclusively said at high speed with almost all emphasis on the vowel and in practice sound almost exactly the same, especially when coming off the back of a consonant
You misunderstand me. I am saying that random, irregular change is unlikely to create the sound /th/ (or /θ/ in phonetic notation, which I’ll use from now on). As you correctly note, by itself that means very little, but it does reinforce all the other evidence I and others have mentioned.
(The sound in the word ‘brother’ was formed via a different process: it is the product of regular sound change, specifically Grimm’s Law [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grimm's_law]. This converted all voiceless stop sounds to fricatives: if /p/→/f/ and /k/→/x/, it makes sense that /t/→/θ/ too, because that follows the same pattern.)
I wouldn't say "no" possibility, but it seems like an interesting lay theory can be true a startling fraction of the time, but to prove its truth probably involves wading through decades of established research from centuries ago.
For example, if it's just a corruption, you should expect the two words to rarely occur with different meanings within a corpus. I don't know about the 8th century corpus, but if it happens there, that would be strong evidence against the corruption theory. Also the article mentions in German the two are still separate.