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A friend asked me a question I couldn't answer, but thought perhaps you could: ..why does our language make "fire-y" into "fier-y"
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Carpal Tunnel
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if you go back far enough, the spellings were fyr and fyry. "the offbeat spelling is a relic of one of the attempts to render O.E. "y" in fyr in a changing system of vowel sounds." [Online Etymology Dictionary]
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The short answer is because our English spelling system is not rational. It is not based on rules. How we spell is oftentimes a mixture of etymological wishful thinking and historical accidents.
For the long answer we have to look at the languages that present-day English are decended from: Middle English and Old English. Fire in Old English (sometimes called Anglo-Saxon) was fȳr (alt. fīr). By the time Old English had turned into Middle English, fȳr had become fīr (also spelled fier, vir, fer, ver, feir, veir, fur, fuir, vur, feur, feor, foir). What happened? Why so many different spellings. Well, some big changes took place between when Old English and Middle English were spoken and written. Old English was pretty much written as it was spoken (and there were a few dialects), but towards the end of the Old English period, one dialect and its orthography were used in the chanceries of all the different English kingdoms. The in 1066 CE, a Frenchified Viking named Guillaume conquored those Old English kingdoms and became William the Conqueror. Old English was replaced by the Norman dialect of Old French. By the time English again became the language of the English court, Old English was long gone, and Middle English took its place. Many of the literate people (monks usually) had been trained in the Norman spelling system, and when they started to write down Middle English they used a mixture of the old Old English orthographies and the new-fangled Continental systems. Then another huge linguistic event took place: the Great English Vowel Movement. Most of the vowel sounds in English changed how they were pronounced. That's why English "long" vowels (actually usually diphthongs in the Early Modern to Present Day English are not pronounced like the rest of the Europeans languages pronounce them. (Think Italian vowels or Spanish, instead of the English.) Fiery was first recorded in the Middle English period written something like furie. By the time of Nathan Bailey's dictionary (1721) and Dr Johnson's (1755), the spelling had been fixed as fiery.
Ceci n'est pas un seing.
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zmjezhd: [blowing kiss e] :-)
Welcome, LST. If you think about it, fiery is more phonetically accurate than firey. Phonetically, I guess fire should be fier, and ire should be ier, etc. Weird. Yes, that was intentional.
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enthusiast
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thank you zmjezhd. the way you told that story reminded me of David Crystal's Stories of English which had many similar fascinating etymological histories in it.
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zmjezhd: [blowing kiss e] :-)
Welcome, LST. If you think about it, fiery is more phonetically accurate than firey. Phonetically, I guess fire should be fier, and ire should be ier, etc. Weird. Yes, that was intentional. And WEIRD comes to us from WYRD (meaning "fate"), referring to the "weird sisters", the Fates. And Shakespeard employed them as the 'three witches". And the adjective grew out of Shakespeares' interpretation.
----please, draw me a sheep----
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You knew that! I cannot WOW you.
----please, draw me a sheep----
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Nope. I have always hated Shakespeare, and thus never had the slightest interest in learning anything about him or his daggoned unreadable plays. Nor did I know about WYRD (meaning "fate") . So, thank you.
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his daggoned unreadable plays I could never read plays, either. That shouldn't stop you from going to see one. It's a completely different experience. If the actors are any good at all you will understand the play a lot better than you ever could by trying to read it.
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