6 ms·

Random off topic... This actually has happened with some words coming to English, because of the ‘a’ vs ‘an’ rule when preceding a consonant or a vowel. A gre

Random off topic... This actually has happened with some words coming to English, because of the ‘a’ vs ‘an’ rule when preceding a consonant or a vowel. A great example of this is the word ‘an apron’ and ‘a napkin’ come from the same old French word ‘naperon’. For some reason in one case the ‘n’ transferred from one form of the word vs. not in the other, I believe that’s referred to as faulty separation, and there are a bunch of other words that it happened with as well.

asveikau 6y ago
I believe "newt" also has an N for this reason.
noja 6y ago
> when preceding a consonant or a vowel. When preceding the sound of consonant or a vowel.
- doesntmeananyth 6y ago
  This is somewhat tautological, since consonants and vowels are already speech sounds.
  - tremon 6y ago
    No, not really. The word "user" starts with a consonant sound, for example, even though "u" is a written vowel.
    - asveikau 6y ago
      From what I have seen, people writing about linguistics do not usually bother specifying this distinction in this context. It is usually implied that an expression like "following a vowel" or "following a consonant" has nothing to do with orthography, but the actual phonetics. The orthography is not really considered a source of truth.
  - noja 6y ago
    They are sounds as well as groups of letters, but the OP didn't specify, hence my clarification. Some examples: * "He has an MBA" because "M" sounds like it starts with a vowel (here: "em"). * "a university" ("you-ni...")
msla 6y ago
In linguistics, it's called rebracketing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebracketing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebracketing > Rebracketing often focuses on highly probable word boundaries: "a noodle" might become "an oodle", since "an oodle" sounds just as grammatically correct as "a noodle", and likewise "an eagle" might become "a neagle", but "the bowl" would not become "th ebowl" and "a kite" would not become "ak ite". > Technically, bracketing is the process of breaking an utterance into its constituent parts. The term is akin to parsing for larger sentences, but it is normally restricted to morphological processes at the sublexical level, i.e. within the particular word or lexeme. For example, the word uneventful is conventionally bracketed as [un+[event+ful]], and the bracketing [[un+event]+ful] leads to completely different semantics. Re-bracketing is the process of seeing the same word as a different morphological decomposition, especially where the new etymology becomes the conventional norm. The name false splitting, also called misdivision, in particular is often reserved for the case where two words mix but still remain two words (as in the "noodle" and "eagle" examples above). Other examples: > The English word outrage is a loanword from French, where it was formed by combining the adverb outre (meaning "beyond") with the suffix -age; thus, the original literal meaning is "beyondness" – that is, beyond what is acceptable. The rebracketing as a compound of out- with the noun or verb rage has led to both a different pronunciation than the one to be expected for such a loanword (compare umbrage) and an additional meaning of "angry reaction" not present in French. > Many words coined in a scientific context as neologisms are formed with suffixes arising from rebracketing existing terms. One example is the suffix -ol used to name alcohols, such as methanol. Its origin is the rebracketing of al•cohol as alcoh•ol. The word alcohol derives from the Arabic al-kuḥl, in which al is the definite article and kuḥl (i.e., kohl), is based on the Semitic triliteral root K-Ḥ-L.

asveikau 6y ago

I believe "newt" also has an N for this reason.

noja 6y ago

> when preceding a consonant or a vowel. When preceding the sound of consonant or a vowel.

doesntmeananyth 6y ago
This is somewhat tautological, since consonants and vowels are already speech sounds.
- tremon 6y ago
  No, not really. The word "user" starts with a consonant sound, for example, even though "u" is a written vowel.
  - asveikau 6y ago
    From what I have seen, people writing about linguistics do not usually bother specifying this distinction in this context. It is usually implied that an expression like "following a vowel" or "following a consonant" has nothing to do with orthography, but the actual phonetics. The orthography is not really considered a source of truth.
- noja 6y ago
  They are sounds as well as groups of letters, but the OP didn't specify, hence my clarification. Some examples: * "He has an MBA" because "M" sounds like it starts with a vowel (here: "em"). * "a university" ("you-ni...")

msla 6y ago

In linguistics, it's called rebracketing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebracketing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rebracketing > Rebracketing often focuses on highly probable word boundaries: "a noodle" might become "an oodle", since "an oodle" sounds just as grammatically correct as "a noodle", and likewise "an eagle" might become "a neagle", but "the bowl" would not become "th ebowl" and "a kite" would not become "ak ite". > Technically, bracketing is the process of breaking an utterance into its constituent parts. The term is akin to parsing for larger sentences, but it is normally restricted to morphological processes at the sublexical level, i.e. within the particular word or lexeme. For example, the word uneventful is conventionally bracketed as [un+[event+ful]], and the bracketing [[un+event]+ful] leads to completely different semantics. Re-bracketing is the process of seeing the same word as a different morphological decomposition, especially where the new etymology becomes the conventional norm. The name false splitting, also called misdivision, in particular is often reserved for the case where two words mix but still remain two words (as in the "noodle" and "eagle" examples above). Other examples: > The English word outrage is a loanword from French, where it was formed by combining the adverb outre (meaning "beyond") with the suffix -age; thus, the original literal meaning is "beyondness" – that is, beyond what is acceptable. The rebracketing as a compound of out- with the noun or verb rage has led to both a different pronunciation than the one to be expected for such a loanword (compare umbrage) and an additional meaning of "angry reaction" not present in French. > Many words coined in a scientific context as neologisms are formed with suffixes arising from rebracketing existing terms. One example is the suffix -ol used to name alcohols, such as methanol. Its origin is the rebracketing of al•cohol as alcoh•ol. The word alcohol derives from the Arabic al-kuḥl, in which al is the definite article and kuḥl (i.e., kohl), is based on the Semitic triliteral root K-Ḥ-L.