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Seems similar to how "a napron" turned into "an apron". More examples here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebracketing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebracketin

• taco_emoji 10y ago
  And the reverse happened with "an ewt" => "a newt". And interestingly neither "eft" nor "napkin" got rebracketed, even though they're cognate with "[n]ewt" and "[n]apron", respectively.
  • pacaro 10y ago
    Pure speculation, but an apron (or 'a napron' if you prefer) is (or was) a very personal item, compared with a napkin which is usually part of a large set of similar-to-identical items. So the expression 'mine napron' (hard to say) becomes 'mine apron' (easy to say). Whereas people weren't possessive about napkins. Trivia: British English gets the word 'nappy' from 'napkin', whereas the American English 'diaper' comes from the type of fabric from which the 'napkin' was made
• greeneggs 10y ago
  The fruit example of rebracketing (which doesn't seem to be on that Wikipedia list) is "orange". It came from "naranj", but lost the initial 'n' (except in Spanish, where "una naranja" protects the 'n'). [1] http://www.bonappetit.com/test-kitchen/ingredients/article/the-etymology-of-the-orange http://www.bonappetit.com/test-kitchen/ingredients/article/t... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange_(word) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange_(word)
  • amyjess 10y ago
    I also like how the color was named after the fruit, not the other way around. (there's a similar example with "escalator" and "escalate"; the latter was named after the former)
    • waqf 10y ago
      Well, of course it is. Who would name a fruit after a colour? It only seems surprising because the colour is more mentally salient, so there's a cognitive bias toward assuming it's the original (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Availability_heuristic). By the way, "pink" is also named after a plant (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink_%28flower%29 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pink_%28flower%29).
      • Chinjut 10y ago
        Well, some fruits are sort of named after colors. "blueberry", "blackberry", "Red Delicious", etc. But point taken.
      • jimmaswell 10y ago
        something close is "greens"
    • jacobolus 10y ago
      Though “escalate” is a kind of funny one. “Scale” (meaning climb up) and “escalade” (a military attack of a fort by soldiers climbing up ladders leaning against the walls) are both from the Latin words for ladder/climb. “Escalator” was the trade name of the first commercially successful version of the moving staircase idea at the turn of the 20th century. The company otherwise made elevators, so “escalator” was some kind of invented mashup of “elevator” and “escalade”. There were various competing products under other names, but “escalator” was memorable and easy to understand in relation to the word “elevator”, so their name became the generic term.
  • hasenj 10y ago
    It might be interesting to know that an Arabic, there's still a fruit called Naarinj. It's basically a bigger and more bitter type of orange.
  • LoSboccacc 10y ago
    Fruit linguistic is specially fun because names imply discovery dates and politics. Old fruit have all regional names, say, strawberries, but new discoveries thend to use the discoverer name, like ananas, except when they hate each other, like bananas which is the name used everywhere except where they went platanos in spite.
  • mtdewcmu 10y ago
    "Alligator" comes from "el lagarto" ("the lizard")[1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebracketing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebracketing
• Kuiper 10y ago
  I remember when Orson Card drew my attention to the "a napron -> an apron" example, because the new rebracketing obscures the fact that "napron" and "napkin" come from the same root.