11 ms·
Loss of Mid in English: Free Peasantry and Their Linguistic Advantage
- permo-w 3y agois there no possibility that the word "with" is just a corruption of "mid" in the first place?
- mootothemax 3y agoFrom the article: The first group of views... pins down the disappearance of MID as the need to eliminate excessive expressions and redundant synonyms under MID's competition with WIÐ in the collocational phrases. The second group of views ... establishes a push chain and a drag chain movement between the three prepositions: MID, WIÐ and AGAINST. The third group... observes the cognitive advantage of spatial sense in the survival of prepositions and explains WIÐ's victory over MID... And concludes its introduction with: All three camps of opinions were confined to theoretical hypotheses lacking a quantitative approach, nor was due attention paid to the grand sociolinguistic backdrop of the English feudal society. Therefore, this paper aims to build on the previous research by introducing linguistic data based on quantitative methods, as well as connecting the change to the grander socioeconomic background of the medieval society.
- permo-w 3y agoyes, I read this. your point is?
- Eiim 3y agoAccording to the paper, both words coexisted during Old English. It is less concerned about how they got there and more interested in how with took over once they were both established.
- permo-w 3y agowords can co-exist and still be corruptions of each other
- memsom 3y agoWord meaning can be fluid though. Like Wrist in English and Vrist in Swedish mean completely different body parts - despite the words obviously being related. English has a special way of changing meaning - so words like "meat", "deer", "foul" and "hound" originally meant something like any "food", any "animal", any "bird" and any "dog".
- Zach_the_Lizard 3y agoApparently the two words are unrelated in origin. "With" originally meant something closer to "against," whereas "mid" was closer to "with" in today's English. Over time, "with" changed meanings, we gained the word "against" and "mid" survives in fossil form in words like "midwife."
- permo-w 3y agoit seems like far too much of a coincidence to me that the words sound almost identical in fast spoken language
- memsom 3y agoBoth words exist in Swedish - med and vid, and med means "with" and vid means more like "at".
- einherjae 3y agoVid isnt closer to “by”? (Asking as a Norwegian, since “ved” is “by” or “beside”)
- memsom 3y agoyeah - it can mean "by" too... it has a number of meanings. It is the usual "almost but not quite the same as" you get when languages and prepositions diverge. Norwegian and Swedish are pretty similar, except when they are not.
- canjobear 3y agoWords don't usually change in a one-off way. If you see a change from m to w in one word, you're likely to see it in another word in the same language. For example, in going from Proto-Germanic to English there was a general shift to drop the sound n before fricative sounds, as is apparent in multiple words: English five vs. German fünf, English us vs. German uns, English soft vs. German sanft. In the case of mid and with, we don't see other instances of m turning into w. Coupled with the fact that mid and with used to coexist, and they have plausible etymologies arising from independent sources in Proto-Indo-European, the preponderance of the evidence is for independent origins for the two words.
- canjobear 3y agoNo, the sound change m>w is not otherwise attested, and with has a clear etymological relationship to Proto-Germanic *withro, which is also reflected in things like (slightly archaic) German wider “against”.
- permo-w 3y agothe sound change doesn't have to be otherwise attested. that is a general feature of nouns and more heavily focused on words. mid/with are conjunctions, almost exclusively rapidly pronounced with little emphasis on their consonants, easily becoming corrupted and merged and changed without the need for general language shifts
- bradrn 3y ago> the sound change doesn't have to be otherwise attested. Somewhat counterintuitively, historical evidence shows that most sound changes are regular! Which means they affect all words satisfying the same condition in the same way [0]. Irregular sound changes still occur, but if you look at the history of a language, regular sound change suffices to explain almost all developments. Focussing on the history of English (which is very well documented, e.g. [1]) shows this well. Consonantal changes tend to be very regular: for instance, final /ŋɡ/→/ŋ/ in most dialects. English has an unusually complex vowel system, so vocalic changes tend to be somewhat more chaotic, but still show regularity: e.g. /a/ regularly turned into either /æ/ or /ɑ/. (See also @canjobear’s comment, which makes the same point in a nice way: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36758576 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36758576) [0] This is the ‘Neogrammarian hypothesis’: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neogrammarian https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neogrammarian [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_English https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_Englis...
- canjobear 3y agoIt is true that very frequent words (whether nouns, prepositions, conjunctions, or whatever part of speech) can undergo one-off changes, usually involving dropping syllables. But the phonetic details don't make sense here as a reduction: with is arguably harder to pronounce than mid. You're basically arguing for a rare and poorly understood kind of lexical change with no evidence to support it, against a well-understood and very common kind of change with multiple different strands of converging evidence. It's not impossible that the phonological similarity of "mid" and "with" made it easier for the meanings to coalesce in "with". But it is certain, at least as certain as you can get in historical linguistics, that these were originally two prepositions with independent origins.
- gpvos 3y agoNot really. It's not so hard to follow the etymology sections in Wiktionary. A few clicks down you find: with: from Proto-Indo-European *wi-tero-s, from *wi ("apart") + *-teros mid: from Proto-Indo-European *meth₂, from *me ("with")
- bradrn 3y agoAside from the other sibling comments, on why with and mid always were separate words, it’s worth noting that this sort of thing just doesn’t really happen in the first place. Words can get randomly corrupted, but there’s generally a clear perceptual reason behind it: common processes include, say, switching adjacent consonants (e.g. Old English bridd → bird), or deletion of unstressed or repeated syllables (e.g. library → colloqual pronunciation libry). Random change doesn’t tend to cause wholesale change of the whole word. And especially not in a way which makes it harder to pronounce: the /th/ sound tends to be rather unstable, and many dialects of English have systematically lost it.
- permo-w 3y agoif /th/ is so unstable, why does it exist at all? because /t/ or /d/ sounds become corrupted to /th/ sounds. do you think the word brother always had a /th/ in the middle? much like when football referees slow down a tackle using VAR and lose the real sense of power of the challenge, when you slowly and academically look at written examples of words, you lose the sense of how the words are actually used in practice. conjunctive words like mid and with are almost exclusively said at high speed with almost all emphasis on the vowel and in practice sound almost exactly the same, especially when coming off the back of a consonant
- bradrn 3y ago> if /th/ is so unstable, why does it exist at all? You misunderstand me. I am saying that random, irregular change is unlikely to create the sound /th/ (or /θ/ in phonetic notation, which I’ll use from now on). As you correctly note, by itself that means very little, but it does reinforce all the other evidence I and others have mentioned. (The sound in the word ‘brother’ was formed via a different process: it is the product of regular sound change, specifically Grimm’s Law [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grimm's_law] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grimm's_law]. This converted all voiceless stop sounds to fricatives: if /p/→/f/ and /k/→/x/, it makes sense that /t/→/θ/ too, because that follows the same pattern.)
- metacritic12 3y agoSeems like the literature has a pretty good empirical understanding of the divergence of these two words. I wouldn't say "no" possibility, but it seems like an interesting lay theory can be true a startling fraction of the time, but to prove its truth probably involves wading through decades of established research from centuries ago. For example, if it's just a corruption, you should expect the two words to rarely occur with different meanings within a corpus. I don't know about the 8th century corpus, but if it happens there, that would be strong evidence against the corruption theory. Also the article mentions in German the two are still separate.
- pge 3y agoInteresting that the Oppositional use of WID is shown as going to zero (presumably in favor of 'against' that filled that semantic space), yet that is still a reasonably common usage in modern English. "David fought with Goliath" is used to mean "David fought against Goliath" (oppositional) or "David fought together with Goliath against a common opponent" (parallel). In any case, the replacement of MID with WID (bringing with it some elements of 'against') explains some linguistic quirks I have noticed as a speaker of both English and German as to the differences between 'mit' (German) and 'with' (English), one of which is that 'mit' is not used to denote opposition ('gegen'='against' is used instead), while 'with' can be used that way.
- gpvos 3y agoIn Dutch (which is in some ways "in between" German and English, but usually closer to German), "vechten met" can indicate either opposition or parallelness.
- yorwba 3y agoIn German, too, "kämpfen mit" could be either ("miteinander" and "zusammen" allowing to distinguish between the two if necessary) and other verbs denoting opposition like "streiten" or "hadern" are basically always used with "mit". So GP was a bit hasty in declaring that "mit" is not used for opposition.
- pge 3y agoInteresting - has the usage of 'mit' with 'kämpfen' changed over time? I haven't lived in Germany for over 25 years, but when I first learned German, we were told very directly not to use 'mit' in that way with 'kämpfen' (i.e. that 'kämpfen mit' always meant together not against one another), and I don't remember hearing any exceptions to that when I lived there. I did notice, though, that certain English grammatical constructions were creeping into German, particularly in spoken German among young people. Is this one of those cases, or were my German teachers overly pedantic about something that wasn't strictly true?
- JoeAltmaier 3y agoI'm impressed chiefly with how such linguistic investigations can extract so much from the past. We're talking about wind coming out of mouths 600 years ago! Of course we have writings and written accounts of speech to reference. But there is plenty of that! Fortunately. And current linguistic traditions can tell us where various groups ended up, a little more data. But very indirect.
- 100k 3y agoIf this interests you, I recommend The History of English podcast. The episodes on Old English cover similar linguistic evolution that happened due the influence of Old Norse. https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/ https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/