3 ms·

Aside 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 t

by bradrn 3y ago

Aside 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 ago
if /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.)

by bradrn 3y ago

permo-w 3y ago

if /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.)