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Day: February 26, 2017

What led to Ancient Greeks to create such a fascinating history and culture?

By: | Post date: 2017-02-26 | Comments: No Comments
Posted in categories: Ancient Greek, Culture, History

It’s a good question, and a question that has been posed and discussed by many before. The history of Classical Greece is more interesting than that of other places, because it had more conflict and more players: it wasn’t a steady-state, stable empire. (That came later, with the successors of Alexander.) Of course, being more […]

In Early Modern English the pronunciation of “housewifery” was /’ʔɤzɪfɹəi/. What caused the apparent (partial) reversal in modern pronunciation?

By: | Post date: 2017-02-26 | Comments: 2 Comments
Posted in categories: English, Linguistics

Why did housewifery used to be pronounced uzzifrie, and now it’s pronounced house-wife-ree? Well, let’s look at housewife itself. I’m looking up OED. OED reports that the usual pronunciation in the second half of the 18th century of housewife, as given in pronunciation dictionaries, was /ˈhʌzwɪf/, huzzwiff, with its start matching hus-band (which has the […]