4 ms·

It's not in the article, but loose and lose are another two words in the process of merging, because they are almost homophones. These two are often confused an

It's not in the article, but loose and lose are another two words in the process of merging, because they are almost homophones. These two are often confused and lose seems to be losing the battle.

WalterBright 13y ago
complement and compliment are frequently reversed, too.
knyt 13y ago
In a somewhat similar process, 'lead' (pronounced like the element) seems to have replaced 'led' (the participle or the preterite): "She lead the team."
- cubicle67 13y ago
  I've not seen this before. To me that reads like mixed tense, where lead (rhyming with steed) is the present tense of led
  - thaumasiotes 13y ago
    If "she lead the team" were in the present tense, it would be a gross foreign-speaker error; no native speaker is going to mess up our vestigial 3sg verb rule. But as with lose/"loose", I don't think this is a pronunciation change in progress; I think it's just a spelling mistake, by analogy to read/read.
- InclinedPlane 13y ago
  Lead sounds like read whereas lead sounds like read.
thaumasiotes 13y ago
Well... they're certainly being merged as to spelling. As to pronunciation? Are juice and jews close to being homophones? Moss and maws? Place and plays? Fuss and fuzz? This is a pretty robust distinction in english.
- grey-area 13y ago
  It'll be interesting to see what happens - if spelling is the same or confused for long enough I suspect the pronunciation will also merge, and then we'll have the difficulty of confused meanings - e.g. lose the hounds vs loose the hounds (a potentially fatal error), but if a word like loose is used infrequently enough, it may simply die out, even if the spelling lives on. I suppose people use loose for lose because they are unaware of the separate meaning and lose can have a long middle vowel, so we might end up with one word spelling: loose, meaning: lose. Perhaps as a reaction people will start to emphasise the pronunciation difference and they'll drift apart. NB that discussion of pronunciation does depend heavily on where you live - in one area the two might be clearly distinct, and in others almost indistinguishable. Another example of a common error is the bizarre and illogical it's and its, which I suspect will collapse to its at some point as people can't be bothered with the distinction and the context usually makes it clear. I loved this article because it pointed out that languages evolve mostly through mistakes or elisions which are common enough to become acceptable, and mistakes of 100 years ago become the accepted usage in future and enter the armoury of grammar pedants as indisputable truths.
  - thaumasiotes 13y ago
    The pronunciation of read ("reed") and read ("red") never merged -- and you can find plenty of other examples if you go looking for wordplay, like evening (end of the day) and evening (making something even). People will only base their pronunciation on spelling when they've never heard the word spoken, but loose (not tight) and lose (not win) are both quite common. If its and it's were going to collapse (not an unreasonable guess), I'd bet in the other direction, with its dying and it's surviving. The mistake is pretty much always made in that direction today, as people think "'s for possessives" (or, less generously, as they think "better add an apostrophe").

It's not in the article, but loose and lose are another two words in the process of merging, because they are almost homophones. These two are often confused and lose seems to be losing the battle.

WalterBright 13y ago

complement and compliment are frequently reversed, too.

knyt 13y ago

In a somewhat similar process, 'lead' (pronounced like the element) seems to have replaced 'led' (the participle or the preterite): "She lead the team."

cubicle67 13y ago
I've not seen this before. To me that reads like mixed tense, where lead (rhyming with steed) is the present tense of led
- thaumasiotes 13y ago
  If "she lead the team" were in the present tense, it would be a gross foreign-speaker error; no native speaker is going to mess up our vestigial 3sg verb rule. But as with lose/"loose", I don't think this is a pronunciation change in progress; I think it's just a spelling mistake, by analogy to read/read.
InclinedPlane 13y ago
Lead sounds like read whereas lead sounds like read.

thaumasiotes 13y ago

Well... they're certainly being merged as to spelling. As to pronunciation? Are juice and jews close to being homophones? Moss and maws? Place and plays? Fuss and fuzz? This is a pretty robust distinction in english.

grey-area 13y ago
It'll be interesting to see what happens - if spelling is the same or confused for long enough I suspect the pronunciation will also merge, and then we'll have the difficulty of confused meanings - e.g. lose the hounds vs loose the hounds (a potentially fatal error), but if a word like loose is used infrequently enough, it may simply die out, even if the spelling lives on. I suppose people use loose for lose because they are unaware of the separate meaning and lose can have a long middle vowel, so we might end up with one word spelling: loose, meaning: lose. Perhaps as a reaction people will start to emphasise the pronunciation difference and they'll drift apart. NB that discussion of pronunciation does depend heavily on where you live - in one area the two might be clearly distinct, and in others almost indistinguishable. Another example of a common error is the bizarre and illogical it's and its, which I suspect will collapse to its at some point as people can't be bothered with the distinction and the context usually makes it clear. I loved this article because it pointed out that languages evolve mostly through mistakes or elisions which are common enough to become acceptable, and mistakes of 100 years ago become the accepted usage in future and enter the armoury of grammar pedants as indisputable truths.
- thaumasiotes 13y ago
  The pronunciation of read ("reed") and read ("red") never merged -- and you can find plenty of other examples if you go looking for wordplay, like evening (end of the day) and evening (making something even). People will only base their pronunciation on spelling when they've never heard the word spoken, but loose (not tight) and lose (not win) are both quite common. If its and it's were going to collapse (not an unreasonable guess), I'd bet in the other direction, with its dying and it's surviving. The mistake is pretty much always made in that direction today, as people think "'s for possessives" (or, less generously, as they think "better add an apostrophe").