Pronunciation errors that made the English language
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
* In the "words that begin with an n" category he didn't include the most famous example: orange, the fruit, which has an n in Persian and Arabic from which it was borrowed but lost it (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange_(fruit)#Etymology)
* I used to think that baby was the actual word and babe was a corruption, turns out most probably it was just the reverse (baby < babe + y) (http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/44883/was-baby-or...)
* Somewhat related to the last category: Have you ever wondered why the initial sound in chair and chandelier are pronounced differently in English? There was a sound change in French, chair was borrowed before that change and chandelier, like many other French word that start with ch, after that change.
* According to OED the reason that some animal names have the same singular and plural was that they originally contained a long vowel, e.g. deer, sheep, fish. Turns out, horse was also in this group but after a sound change its vowel shortened, hence the -s plural now.
In total around 8% of the spanish dictionary is derived from arabic.[1]
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_language_influence_on_th...
[1] http://cvc.cervantes.es/ensenanza/biblioteca_ele/asele/pdf/1...
Apparent counter-evidence: the relevant Portuguese definite article is "a" rather than "la" as in Spanish.
Counter-counter-evidence: at least one source (W V O Quine's "Quiddities") tells me that once upon a time the Portuguese definite article was "la" rather than "a". However, Quine was a philosopher rather than a historian of language, this particular book is a fairly frivolous one, and I don't know how far I can trust him.
Counter-counter-counter-evidence: A few minutes of googling haven't found me any other evidence for Portuguese, or any other language spoken in Portugal, ever having had "la" as a definite article.
Make of all that what you will. I'd be very surprised if it weren't derived from a definite article prefix, but exactly how it happened I would rather not guess.
Adder, apron and umpire all used to start with an "n". Constructions like "A nadder" or "Mine napron" were so common the first letter was assumed to be part of the preceding word. Linguists call this kind of thing reanalysis or rebracketing.
I learnt that by reading The Wee Free Men by PTerry: "Aye, it's no' that good for the ship, havin' tae drink oout o' that pond after we've been bathing. It's terrible, hearin' a ship try tae spit."
(When in doubt, assume the more "dialectal" pronunciation is the older one. Though I think the wee free men actually overdo it and pronounce plural ship too.)
Seriously, don't do this. There is no such phenomenon.
Latterly it came to be associated with the fruit and colour.
Since we're trading anectotes, I'll share mine here:
When taking words from another language, the process often falls under one of two types: loanwords, which are taken intact from their native language (e.g. doppelganger), and calques, which are literally translated as idiom (e.g. flea market).
What's the anecdote? Loanword is a calque of the German lehnwort, and calque is a French loanword.
(also, @devin, doppelgänger, ;) )
My guess is that this process makes "room" in the language for bringing in additional words and grammatical constructs. The language will be just as complicated as before, but will feature lots of new things, while old things get tidied up a bit.
I think What's the irony? would be more appropriate.
This is autology - a word that describes itself.
The third meaning of "irony" in the OED is: A state of affairs or an event that seems deliberately contrary to what was or might be expected; an outcome cruelly, humorously, or strangely at odds with assumptions or expectations. I don't think that's so far out -- one might (if not thinking clearly) expect that if one of "calque" and "loanword" is a calque and one is a loanword, they should be "the right way round", so the fact that they aren't is ironic in an only-slightly-extended sense.
But, speaking of autology:
Call an adjective "autological" if it describes itself (examples: "recondite", "pentasyllabic"), and "heterological" if it doesn't (examples: "Greek", "monosyllabic").
Is "heterological" autological or heterological?
(This little paradox is rather old, and in particular I didn't make it up. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grelling%E2%80%93Nelson_parado...)
Why? This seems like it's just an attitude of "I know the 'correct' way and everyone else is wrong". If we can get the same message across in a simpler construct and with less information exchange why is that bad?
No one complains that gzip is ruining the web by compressing page loading times.
Then just last month a colleague of mine created the reverse in a group email, acknowledging a "fow par". It was a phrase she'd only ever heard and used, never (knowingly) seen spelled.
For a time, while not knowing that "pas" also meant "step" I wondered why in the world anyone would name a city "not from Calais". :-)
"Beef" comes from Old French "boef" (meaning ox), while "cow" comes from Old English "cu."
Same goes for sheep/mutton, pork/pig, and poultry/chicken.
My kid was learning English around the time the brand "Da Kine" became popular. In his second grade way he looked it up in the dictionary and decided it was a farm brand.
Jesperson's "Growth and Structure of the English Language" is a fantastic book by the way.
cȳththu is like tuatha, I always thought.
http://etymonline.com/index.php?term=kin
Kith [] < OE cyðð also meaning family, but alternatively neighbors, countrymen, or acquaintances. Obsolete and only extant today in the fixed phrase "kith and kin", but originally meaning [countrymen] and later [friends]. Your kith and kin are all your relationships, blood or otherwise. Your kin are the blood and marriage relationships.
e.g. valediction instead of farewell
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Germanic_and_Latinate_...
You should either reverse the terms in the prepositional phrase (or the language names!), or use an adjective like "counter-respectively" or "regressively".
Calling pig meat pork, or cow meat beef, seems to separate the "yummy stuff" from the "used to walk and make cute noises stuff" in our minds. We don't seem to do it with poultry or seafood, just the mammals.
I'm wondering if that was a culture-wide subconscious "decision" (I don't know the right term for that). It's similar to dehumanizing your enemies, in a way.
Both pork and beef have been used in English (both American and British) for centuries. Both beef and pork refer to the meat from multiple subspecies while fish and poultry are considered game/sports meats and named for the animal 'bested'. You'll note many old recipes simply say "white fish" to denote cod, herring, haddock, pollock or any number of firm, white-fleshed fish. This custom persists today.
I recently visited Indonesia, and people who spoke Indonesian were surprised how good my Indonesian pronunciation was. Apart from some food, I didn't understand a word of Indonesian, but in Indonesian, pronunciation is pretty much phonetic. Just say what it says, and you can't go wrong. Unless you're a native English speaker, in which case all the crazy mangled pronunciation you've grown up with gets in the way.
A lot of languages from totally different corners of the world have agree on pronunciation, and have practically identical rules for it. A few exceptions, like English and French, seem to require mangling it beyond all recognition.
There are more sounds than letters AFAIK. http://w3.inf.fu-berlin.de/lehre/SS05/efs/materials/PhonSymb...
Also, you can combine letters - e.g. keep "naive" the same, but write "fayv" instead of "faiv" for "five" to indicate a diphthong. And keep "ship" the same, but write "shiip" for "sheep" to indicate a long "i" sound.
A better example of a phoneme in English is the aspirated and non-aspirated [p] sound (transcribed as [pʰ] for aspirated). It's just the difference between holding in a bunch of air and pushing it out, and most English people can't hear a difference.
Edit: I may have been confused, were you just pointing these out as being all different phonemes?
Basically, two things.
1. English words are extremely robust to shitty pronunciation.
2. Communication in modern American-English is extremely robust to shitty grammar.
> in Indonesian, pronunciation is pretty much phonetic. Just say what it says, and you can't go wrong
two things are going on.
1. Most languages are confined to a fairly small area, so their phonology is "more or less" similar everywhere. (This is the minor effect.)
2. Read it like it's written, and you'll go badly wrong in many Indonesian-speaking communities. This sort of "the sound is perfectly represented by the spelling" spelling is only possible by designating a particular region's pronunciation as "correct" and all the others as "wrong" (compare e.g. the Mexican and Spanish pronunciations of "azul"). Of, say, British, Australian, and US english, which would you anoint as the master form?
However, such differences are primarily differences in accent. Basic pronunciation is still the same. Sure Brits may say 'ah' where Americans might say 'ay', but they don't suddenly pronounce the 'gh' in 'enough' in a different way. Apart from some differences in idiom (pissed), they can understand each other perfectly. Rhotic versus non-rhotic is the only real big difference I'm aware of: some English speakers pronounce the 'r', some skip it.
There's always more out there than we're aware of. One famous difference is that in Australian english, the words can ("a can of tuna") and can ("I can do that") don't rhyme (I believe "can" is actually the wrong word in AE for "a can of tuna", but the example is just there to illustrate the word's meaning).
> such differences are primarily differences in accent
These obviously exist, but they're often so regular that they don't present much of an obstacle to communication. Vocabulary differences ("a tin of tuna" for "a can of tuna") and meaning differences (like the story where British politicians wanted a motion tabled immediately, because it was important, but American ones felt strongly that it shouldn't be tabled at all, because it was important) happen too.
Australian, British, and American english are nevertheless fairly close. How do you feel about Jamaican english (which is, in its vernacular, not mutually intelligible with the three I just mentioned)?
In the golden radio and early tv days, broadcasters and actors learned to speak with a "mid-atlantic" or transatlantic accent that was constructed to sound like something halfway between American and British Englishes. For a while, it was even taught in upper-class private schools in the U.S. North East.
edit: in fact, the whine-wine merger's own page indicates that the only place they're not merged is a strip of the american South.
(Loughborough)
The original form for at least some of those words is to start with "hw". For example, the first line of the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf is "Hwaet! We Gardena in geardagum". "Hwaet" is the word that became "what" in modern English, and was (given that when the poem was written people tended to spell relatively phonetically) presumably pronounced. According to http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&searc... it's from a Proto-Germanic form *khwat.
I don't know when or why the "h" and the "w" got swapped around, though. Certainly, when people pronounce the "h" it it's more like "h-wot" than "w-hot". Actually, perhaps even more like "f-wot".
I guess the question is still open as to whether the people who pronounce the "h" today are continuing an unbroken tradition that goes back to the Anglo-Saxons (and the majority who don't are using a simplified form), or whether the "h" dropped out of use sometime after the spelling was fixed, and modern speakers are re-introducing it.
I can say, though, that it's generally regarded as "better" to pronounce the "h" by a lot of English people, and it's also strongly pronounced in certain Scottish accents. (Some friends from "posh" parts of Edinburgh definitely pronounce it, and also say something like "Wed'n'sday" pronouncing the "d".)
(Aside: I've read that the "what!" at the start of the poem was a use of the word as something similar to "ah!" or "lo!" or some other relatively meaningless poetical interjection. This gives a wonderful historical context to P.G. Wodehouse's characters greeting each other with a "what, what, what, old thing!". Bertie Wooster was apparently using a construction that dated back a thousand years...)
Swedish has dropped the H (along with other differences) giving vad, vem, vilken, var, vita for what, who, which, where, white.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_articles#Juncture_loss
Sanely presented list of podcasts in the form of an RSS feed at <http://feeds.feedburner.com/SlateLexiconValley?format=xml>.
"A history of the english language in ten minutes"
The teacher then needed to describe what a whore was.
I think she handled it quite well in hindsight considering she had a bunch if immature teenagers to deal with.
but nobody got as far as asking "Are you trying to seduce me Mrs Robinson?"
chortle chortle guffaw teenage idiots
However, the closest thing I'm aware of to a word "starting out with a silent letter" is debt, which was originally spelled (and pronounced) without the 'b'. The 'b' was added by someone who felt the word should better reflect the latin 'debeo', and was never pronounced at any point.
There's a bit in Shakespeare's _Love's Labour's Lost_ where the pedant Holofernes is ranting about how the "b" should be pronounced in those two words, but as you say, it was always silent.
EDIT: Turns out "salmon" and "solder" were originally "saumon" and "soudor", with the "l" added in the 18th century (agsin to reflect the Latin spelling)
Of course French elevated this spelling conservativism to a fetish, proving that you can go to far.
But I find it sad that languages like German that reform their spelling to make it more phonetic saw away the history and meaning from the words and force you to memorise, rather than deduce, meanings. Likewise teaching English reading via "phonics" ignores the interconnection of the words and makes spelling harder rather than easier.
A funny way to respond to English inserting a spurious 'b' into the French dette / dete.
> I find it sad that languages like German that reform their spelling to make it more phonetic saw away the history and meaning from the words and force you to memorise, rather than deduce, meanings
(my emphasis)
This is overstated to the point of complete absurdity. You are always forced to memorize the meanings of words; that's the difference between words and sentences. To a great extent, if you don't have to memorize the meaning, it's not a word. (There are word-level syntax bits, such as arguably the re- prefix to verbs, but really the fact that the meaning is arbitrary is the essence of a word.)
Referring to it as "Eedeeenboooroooo" causes hilarity in local of all levels of seniority.
But as with lose/"loose", I don't think this is a pronunciation change in progress; I think it's just a spelling mistake, by analogy to read/read.
Perhaps as a reaction people will start to emphasise the pronunciation difference and they'll drift apart. NB that discussion of pronunciation does depend heavily on where you live - in one area the two might be clearly distinct, and in others almost indistinguishable.
Another example of a common error is the bizarre and illogical it's and its, which I suspect will collapse to its at some point as people can't be bothered with the distinction and the context usually makes it clear.
I loved this article because it pointed out that languages evolve mostly through mistakes or elisions which are common enough to become acceptable, and mistakes of 100 years ago become the accepted usage in future and enter the armoury of grammar pedants as indisputable truths.
If its and it's were going to collapse (not an unreasonable guess), I'd bet in the other direction, with its dying and it's surviving. The mistake is pretty much always made in that direction today, as people think "'s for possessives" (or, less generously, as they think "better add an apostrophe").
(See also the US meaning of 'table' as in 'postpone for discussion' which has also reversed)
For example did "rain" and "again" rhyme when the itsy bitsy spider was written?
Did "bone" and "none" rhyme when old mother hubbard was written?
That song doesn't rhyme for me either. :(
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no; it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests, and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
For more on this subject, see here:
and here:
http://originalpronunciation.com/
To hear Sonnet 116 in OP, see here:
So we went to the dictionary where we both learned the source of the confusion:
http://teachinghistory.org/history-content/ask-a-historian/2...
Borrowed from French but altered to an Italian prononciation. There are other such words in English, but I can't think what they are at the moment.
Plenty more here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto-antonym
Thou -- Middle English, from Old English thū; akin to Old High German dū thou, Latin tu, Greek sy First Known Use: before 12th century
So "thou" is cognate with German "du", and "you" is related to German "ihr", the plural of "sie", if I'm understanding this correctly.
Still no way it's got anything to do with writing "thou" with a thorn at the front and misreading it as a "y", though.
KILL-o-metre