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Category: English
What caused the English Great Vowel Shift?
I’ll give a general rather than a specific answer. The Great English Vowel Shift is a celebrated instance of a Chain shift, a sound change with impacts several sounds one after the other, as a kind of chain reaction. It helps when discussing vowel changes (which are particularly susceptible to chain shifts) to have a […]
Is the use of the word “niggardly” acceptable and politically correct?
There’s several perspectives one can take on the whole sorry-ass saga of niggardly, on which as always see Controversies about the word “niggardly”. There’s the perspective of the linguist, the language-lover, the activist, and the anti-American. The Anti-American first, so I can get it off my chest: Christ, I’m glad I don’t live in your […]
Why are the generic male endings -er and -or accepted as gender neutral but -man isn’t?
The archaicness of -trix is indeed very very relevant to the topic. I agree with Jason Whyte’s answer, I’ll just elaborate on it. In the past of English, gendering was overt, and feminine actor suffixes were quite marked. –er was masculine and had a –ress counterpart; –or was masculine and had a –trix counterpart; –man […]
When, and why, did the word ‘sure’ become so ubiquitous at the start of answering a question?
I’d like to thank my wife for arranging access for me to the State Library of Victoria (for free!) Inter alia, this gets me access to the OED. OED? First attested use: 1651, in a trial transcript: Att. Gen. Was Mr. Love present when this letter was read? Far. Yes sure, he was present. First […]
In the English language, why is remuneration pronounced renumeration?
People do mispronounce remuneration as renumeration all the time, contra some people’s denial of it here. God knows I’ve done it, and I should know better. Why do people do it? Because: The stems muner– and numer– are confusable through the oldest confusion in the historical linguistics book: Metathesis (linguistics). People are familiar with the […]
Has there ever been an attempt to “purify” English by removing Latin/French words and reintroucing the old Germanic words (like many languages did)?
Thanks to Loren Peter Lugosch for posting the Wikipedia link. The most serious recent attempt to purify English was William Barnes. He called for the purification of English by removal of Greek, Latin and foreign influences so that it might be better understood by those without a classical education. For example, the word “photograph” (from […]
Is it possible to write English in Greek script? Would it look better?
This could go one of two ways, neither pretty. You could phonetically transcribe English into Greek, Ancient or Modern, using the phonetics of the Greek alphabet unchanged. As Konstantinos Konstantinides says, that would sound horrible, because it really would be English with Greek vowels and consonants. In fact, when Greeklish ( Greek in ASCII) was […]
Why is “40” spelled “forty” and not “fourty”?
Thank you OED: four < *fowr < Middle English fower < feower < Old English feower forty since 15th century; fourty Middle English up to 17th century < Middle English fourti (and, in parentheses, forti) < feouwerti < Old English feowertig .So the forti spelling was apparently occasional in Middle English, but not regular. This […]
What would have world lost (apart from some more password combinations) if it had not used capital letters?
Not a whole lot. Consider: Only very few scripts even have a case distinction: Roman, Greek, Cyrillic, Armenian. Georgian and Cherokee are picking up case now, but that’s not because they need to, that’s because they’re being culturally influenced from hegemonic scripts. Languages vary wildly in what they choose to capitalise. German capitalises nouns; most […]
Some linguists say there are 91 English spelling rules and some say there are none. Who is right?
Agreed with Brian (more or less). Despite the inconsistencies and hypercorrections and weirdness, English spelling is not random. If you see a new word, you have reasonable chance of coming up with a consistent pronunciation; and if you hear a new word, you have a (somewhat less) reasonable chance of coming up with a consistent […]