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Joined: Mar 2000
Posts: 141
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OP
member
Joined: Mar 2000
Posts: 141 |
When you hear someone pronouncing "ask" as "aks" or "pretty" as "purty",
do you find yourself looking down your nose? Not so fast! What you're
witnessing is the English language busy at work, mutating, evolving, and
refurbishing its wordstock, making things easier to pronounce. Known as
metathesis, it is the same process that gave us dirt (from drit) and curd
(from crud!). If you ever used the word flimsy, you did it: the word is
the metathesized form of the word filmsy. It is somewhat like our friend
spoonerism, except that here the letters or sounds get transposed within
the same word. Many everyday words appear in a form created by such
interchange of letters: the word bird came from Old English brid, third
from thridda. Going back to "ask," here is an interesting twist. The word
"ask" itself came from Old English forms acsian and ascian that co-existed.
Eventually the latter won over and became standard. So what we are seeing
here is history repeating itself. A few hundred years and who knows, we
may be exhorting, "Aks not what your country can do for you ..."
This week we'll look at a few more words that are metathetic forms of
former words.
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Joined: Dec 2000
Posts: 12
stranger
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stranger
Joined: Dec 2000
Posts: 12 |
OK so here's what your saying, when my mom say's purty instead of pretty she's just contribuating to the evolution of a living language, and I should look down on her?
How annoying! just when I thought I had found out that mothers are not always right.
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Joined: Apr 2000
Posts: 3,065
Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
Joined: Apr 2000
Posts: 3,065 |
In reply to:
I should look down on her
Only if you're considerably taller than she is.
Bingley
Bingley
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Joined: Dec 2000
Posts: 1,055
old hand
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old hand
Joined: Dec 2000
Posts: 1,055 |
> Only if you're considerably taller than she is.
Or if she were seated
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