Very interesting article with cool examples. Here are a few more:
* In the "words that begin with an n" category he didn't include the most famous example: orange, the fruit, which has an n in Persian and Arabic from which it was borrowed but lost it (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange_(fruit)#Etymology)
* Somewhat related to the last category: Have you ever wondered why the initial sound in chair and chandelier are pronounced differently in English? There was a sound change in French, chair was borrowed before that change and chandelier, like many other French word that start with ch, after that change.
* According to OED the reason that some animal names have the same singular and plural was that they originally contained a long vowel, e.g. deer, sheep, fish. Turns out, horse was also in this group but after a sound change its vowel shortened, hence the -s plural now.
Another example of words borrowed from French before and after the 'ch' -> 'sh' shift: chief and chef are actually derived from the same French word, but chef arrived later and was applied in English only to the cooking context.
It seems very possible to me that "babe" was the original, "baby" was derived from that, and "babe" in modern colloquial use is a shortened version of "baby" that just happens to match its predecessor.
The Iberian peninsular was inhabited by arabic speakers for over 700 years, there are a huge number of words in castellano (the Spanish language), directly borrowed from them.[0]
In total around 8% of the spanish dictionary is derived from arabic.[1]
This is a common phenomenon in English. The "Adder" (type of snake native to Britain) was originally "Nadder". In old/middle English, it was "a/an", "my/mine", so "mine Edward" and "my Nedward" sounded the same, hence a nickname (ironically originally "ekename", so another case) for Edward is "Ned".
Adder, apron and umpire all used to start with an "n". Constructions like "A nadder" or "Mine napron" were so common the first letter was assumed to be part of the preceding word. Linguists call this kind of thing reanalysis or rebracketing.
Kinda-obvious guess: definite article "la" rather than indefinite article.
Apparent counter-evidence: the relevant Portuguese definite article is "a" rather than "la" as in Spanish.
Counter-counter-evidence: at least one source (W V O Quine's "Quiddities") tells me that once upon a time the Portuguese definite article was "la" rather than "a". However, Quine was a philosopher rather than a historian of language, this particular book is a fairly frivolous one, and I don't know how far I can trust him.
Counter-counter-counter-evidence: A few minutes of googling haven't found me any other evidence for Portuguese, or any other language spoken in Portugal, ever having had "la" as a definite article.
Make of all that what you will. I'd be very surprised if it weren't derived from a definite article prefix, but exactly how it happened I would rather not guess.
As to the counter-counter-counter-evidence, the development of definite articles in Romance languages is well-understood (Latin didn't have them). They come from the adjective "ille, illa (, illud)" meaning "that" (imagine pointing at "that"). So we can immediately conclude that yes, there was an L in there at some point in the history of portuguese. It seems a little more likely that the adjective became an article with the degenerate form "la" and then degenerated further than that the adjective lost its only consonant and then turned into an article.
> * According to OED the reason that some animal names have the same singular and plural was that they originally contained a long vowel, e.g. deer, sheep, fish. Turns out, horse was also in this group but after a sound change its vowel shortened, hence the -s plural now.
I learnt that by reading The Wee Free Men by PTerry:
"Aye, it's no' that good for the ship, havin' tae drink oout o' that pond after we've been bathing. It's terrible, hearin' a ship try tae spit."
(When in doubt, assume the more "dialectal" pronunciation is the older one. Though I think the wee free men actually overdo it and pronounce plural ship too.)
Interestingly, Orange as a place name (and the House of Orange) has a different derivation, it came from Arausio which was named after a Celtic water god.
Latterly it came to be associated with the fruit and colour.
The latest iteration of the language, yes. Fifty or a hundred years from now, we'll see. I think (hope) that we'll see a backlash against merging and simplification. Perhaps leetspeak will be the new Esperanto.
Since we're trading anectotes, I'll share mine here:
When taking words from another language, the process often falls under one of two types: loanwords, which are taken intact from their native language (e.g. doppelganger), and calques, which are literally translated as idiom (e.g. flea market).
What's the anecdote? Loanword is a calque of the German lehnwort, and calque is a French loanword.
Since this is a language thread, worth pointing out that an anecdote is a story about an event, place or person. What you've shared is in entertaining fact, not an anecdote.
> I think (hope) that we'll see a backlash against merging and simplification.
My guess is that this process makes "room" in the language for bringing in additional words and grammatical constructs. The language will be just as complicated as before, but will feature lots of new things, while old things get tidied up a bit.
> I think (hope) that we'll see a backlash against merging and simplification
Why? This seems like it's just an attitude of "I know the 'correct' way and everyone else is wrong". If we can get the same message across in a simpler construct and with less information exchange why is that bad?
No one complains that gzip is ruining the web by compressing page loading times.
The third meaning of "irony" in the OED is: A state of affairs or an event that seems deliberately contrary to what was or might be expected; an outcome cruelly, humorously, or strangely at odds with assumptions or expectations. I don't think that's so far out -- one might (if not thinking clearly) expect that if one of "calque" and "loanword" is a calque and one is a loanword, they should be "the right way round", so the fact that they aren't is ironic in an only-slightly-extended sense.
But, speaking of autology:
Call an adjective "autological" if it describes itself (examples: "recondite", "pentasyllabic"), and "heterological" if it doesn't (examples: "Greek", "monosyllabic").
Many years ago I had a friend apologise verbally for her "forx pass". Turns out she'd only ever read the phrase faux pas.
Then just last month a colleague of mine created the reverse in a group email, acknowledging a "fow par". It was a phrase she'd only ever heard and used, never (knowingly) seen spelled.
Exactly! There's a Frazz cartoon about how you can tell if a person reads a lot (mispronounces) or watches TV a lot (misspells). I know which category I'd rather be in.
Yep. I used to feel embarrassed about my mispronunciation fax passes, until I realized they mostly came from reading beyond my immediate opportunity to apply.
"Faux pas" literally means "false step". But "pas" in French also means "not". There is a city in northern France called "Pas de Calais", which roughly means the "steps" or entrance of Calais (there's a strait, and the Allies successfully fooled the Germans into thinking it would be the D-Day landing site).
For a time, while not knowing that "pas" also meant "step" I wondered why in the world anyone would name a city "not from Calais". :-)
A friend of mine once said "caffitary" for cafetière and for about three seconds I genuinely thought, "Wow, have I been pronouncing that wrong all my life?"
Though not related specifically to pronunciation, a fun fact is that a lot of English words for meat and livestock are borrowed from Anglo-Saxon and French words respectively. This apparently comes from the Norman conquest: the French nobility dealt more with prepared meat while Anglo-Saxon peasants dealt more with livestock.
"Beef" comes from Old French "boef" (meaning ox), while "cow" comes from Old English "cu."
Same goes for sheep/mutton, pork/pig, and poultry/chicken.
As a rule of thumb, English is choke-full of Anglo-Saxon/French redundancies that rarely come to light due to a register separation. Anglo-Saxon etymons tend to the lower registers of language, French (along with Latin, although the line between a word that came from French or straight from Latin can be very blurred, and Greek) ones to the higher.
This generalizes and is reinforced even more into words of Germanic origin being automatically considered lower register, while Latin and Greek words being assumed to be higher.
"Cease and desist" is a different, and also interesting, case from the field/table distinction baddox referred to. According to Jespersen ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otto_Jespersen ) phrases like "kith and kin" or "cattle and kine" are very old in English and far predate the Norman invasion.
My kid was learning English around the time the brand "Da Kine" became popular. In his second grade way he looked it up in the dictionary and decided it was a farm brand.
Jesperson's "Growth and Structure of the English Language" is a fantastic book by the way.
But wait... cattle and kine are the same thing, much like cease and desist. Kith and kin aren't the same. Do you also think it's strange to say "friends and family"?
So, nothing you said is correct. Ken [know] < OE cennan "make known; declare". Kin [family] < OE cynn "family" (among other meanings, but that one seems apt).
Kith [] < OE cyðð also meaning family, but alternatively neighbors, countrymen, or acquaintances. Obsolete and only extant today in the fixed phrase "kith and kin", but originally meaning [countrymen] and later [friends]. Your kith and kin are all your relationships, blood or otherwise. Your kin are the blood and marriage relationships.
There are two noticeable mistakes is your prior comment. One is a simple mistake of fact; kin is not related to ken. The other is the etymological fallacy, which says that the meaning of a word is or should be controlled by what it meant in the past.
>> 'kin' comes from 'ken', so 'kinfolk' are folks that think like you
Is that right? I cannot find such a reference. Could you please give a source for the etymology.
cattle and kine is another doublet. two different words used by two different groups. kith and kin, is like saying neighbours/extending group and family. but your right its not a doubling, but more a broading.
How interesting, thanks. I'd never paused to consider the origin of tautologies like terms and conditions, somehow you just soak them up and use them without thinking.
So my follow-on question is: is urban American culture's general squeamishness about our food sources a cause of or an effect of that distinction?
Calling pig meat pork, or cow meat beef, seems to separate the "yummy stuff" from the "used to walk and make cute noises stuff" in our minds. We don't seem to do it with poultry or seafood, just the mammals.
I'm wondering if that was a culture-wide subconscious "decision" (I don't know the right term for that). It's similar to dehumanizing your enemies, in a way.
Both pork and beef have been used in English (both American and British) for centuries. Both beef and pork refer to the meat from multiple subspecies while fish and poultry are considered game/sports meats and named for the animal 'bested'. You'll note many old recipes simply say "white fish" to denote cod, herring, haddock, pollock or any number of firm, white-fleshed fish. This custom persists today.
...English words for meat and livestock are borrowed from Anglo-Saxon and French words respectively.
You should either reverse the terms in the prepositional phrase (or the language names!), or use an adjective like "counter-respectively" or "regressively".
Honestly, I wouldn't mind if we could get rid on the English language as the world's dominant language altogether. The pronunciation rules are completely crazy.
I recently visited Indonesia, and people who spoke Indonesian were surprised how good my Indonesian pronunciation was. Apart from some food, I didn't understand a word of Indonesian, but in Indonesian, pronunciation is pretty much phonetic. Just say what it says, and you can't go wrong. Unless you're a native English speaker, in which case all the crazy mangled pronunciation you've grown up with gets in the way.
A lot of languages from totally different corners of the world have agree on pronunciation, and have practically identical rules for it. A few exceptions, like English and French, seem to require mangling it beyond all recognition.
The primary role of a language is as a medium to transmit information from one location to another. English has developed from origins with traditional diversity of culture (anywhere British Empire), and, as a result, most of the words and phrases have an awesome Hamming distance.
Basically, two things.
1. English words are extremely robust to shitty pronunciation.
2. Communication in modern American-English is extremely robust to shitty grammar.
You're suffering under some illusions. When you say
> in Indonesian, pronunciation is pretty much phonetic. Just say what it says, and you can't go wrong
two things are going on.
1. Most languages are confined to a fairly small area, so their phonology is "more or less" similar everywhere. (This is the minor effect.)
2. Read it like it's written, and you'll go badly wrong in many Indonesian-speaking communities. This sort of "the sound is perfectly represented by the spelling" spelling is only possible by designating a particular region's pronunciation as "correct" and all the others as "wrong" (compare e.g. the Mexican and Spanish pronunciations of "azul"). Of, say, British, Australian, and US english, which would you anoint as the master form?
Indonesia is actually a pretty large an diverse country, but I haven't visited all corners, so I have no idea how much pronunciation of Bahasa Indonesia varies.
However, such differences are primarily differences in accent. Basic pronunciation is still the same. Sure Brits may say 'ah' where Americans might say 'ay', but they don't suddenly pronounce the 'gh' in 'enough' in a different way. Apart from some differences in idiom (pissed), they can understand each other perfectly. Rhotic versus non-rhotic is the only real big difference I'm aware of: some English speakers pronounce the 'r', some skip it.
> Rhotic versus non-rhotic is the only real big difference I'm aware of
There's always more out there than we're aware of. One famous difference is that in Australian english, the words can ("a can of tuna") and can ("I can do that") don't rhyme (I believe "can" is actually the wrong word in AE for "a can of tuna", but the example is just there to illustrate the word's meaning).
> such differences are primarily differences in accent
These obviously exist, but they're often so regular that they don't present much of an obstacle to communication. Vocabulary differences ("a tin of tuna" for "a can of tuna") and meaning differences (like the story where British politicians wanted a motion tabled immediately, because it was important, but American ones felt strongly that it shouldn't be tabled at all, because it was important) happen too.
Australian, British, and American english are nevertheless fairly close. How do you feel about Jamaican english (which is, in its vernacular, not mutually intelligible with the three I just mentioned)?
You're only interested in phonemes ("The smallest contrastive linguistic unit which may bring about a change of meaning" - [1]), not sounds. For example, the "th" in "thin" and "this" or "i" in "see" and "sit" and "happy" etc., even though they are different sounds, they are the same phonemes - substituting one for the other will not change the meaning of the word, it will just make other people think you have a strange accent.
Also, you can combine letters - e.g. keep "naive" the same, but write "fayv" instead of "faiv" for "five" to indicate a diphthong. And keep "ship" the same, but write "shiip" for "sheep" to indicate a long "i" sound.
Sorry but I don't think you're right about [ð] (this) and [θ] (thin) being a phoneme. For one, most native English speakers hear a difference if you ask them, and it does seem possible to find a minimal pair, that is, two words that mean different things in English but differ only in those two sounds. (e.g. thigh vs. thy)
A better example of a phoneme in English is the aspirated and non-aspirated [p] sound (transcribed as [pʰ] for aspirated). It's just the difference between holding in a bunch of air and pushing it out, and most English people can't hear a difference.
Edit: I may have been confused, were you just pointing these out as being all different phonemes?
You're right, there might be minimal pairs, but for most words the exact pronunciation doesn't matter - like there is a minimal pair for [i] and [i:] (ship/sheep, beach/bitch), but (1) not everyone can pronounce it, so often you must be able to infer the meaning from the context, and (2) for most words it doesn't matter (see, thin, happy, ...)
Not only that, but in Serbo-Croatian, in latin script, "nj" is a digraph for the ɲ phoneme. (A very small number of words, mostly of Latin origin, can cause ambivalence because they have "n" and "j" juxtaposed but are meant to properly be pronounced separately, e.g. "konjugacija" /con-yu-gatsiya/ (conjugation)). In fact, correct transcription of "new" would really be "nju" (but only in Serbian, there is no transcription of foreign words in Croatian), so you have "Njujork" for "New York".
I have heard native English speakers in the U.S. with a habit of attempting to pronounce the "h" in words that start with "wh". "white" being a notable example. Furthermore, in their efforts they transpose the two letters, so "white" comes out as "hwight" rather than "wite". I've always thought this to be some sort of affectation intended to elevate themselves above the hoi polloi, but maybe there's some historical basis for it.
My understanding is that it's a middle U.S. accent-ism. Broadcasters learn to speak with this accent as it's perceived "neutral" (General American) and many end up using it. It's not part of my native local mid-East coast accent (the 'h' is silent in words like "white") and it drives me crazy when I hear it on the radio.
In the golden radio and early tv days, broadcasters and actors learned to speak with a "mid-atlantic" or transatlantic accent that was constructed to sound like something halfway between American and British Englishes. For a while, it was even taught in upper-class private schools in the U.S. North East.
The original form for at least some of those words is to start with "hw". For example, the first line of the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf is "Hwaet! We Gardena in geardagum". "Hwaet" is the word that became "what" in modern English, and was (given that when the poem was written people tended to spell relatively phonetically) presumably pronounced. According to http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?allowed_in_frame=0&searc... it's from a Proto-Germanic form *khwat.
I don't know when or why the "h" and the "w" got swapped around, though. Certainly, when people pronounce the "h" it it's more like "h-wot" than "w-hot". Actually, perhaps even more like "f-wot".
I guess the question is still open as to whether the people who pronounce the "h" today are continuing an unbroken tradition that goes back to the Anglo-Saxons (and the majority who don't are using a simplified form), or whether the "h" dropped out of use sometime after the spelling was fixed, and modern speakers are re-introducing it.
I can say, though, that it's generally regarded as "better" to pronounce the "h" by a lot of English people, and it's also strongly pronounced in certain Scottish accents. (Some friends from "posh" parts of Edinburgh definitely pronounce it, and also say something like "Wed'n'sday" pronouncing the "d".)
(Aside: I've read that the "what!" at the start of the poem was a use of the word as something similar to "ah!" or "lo!" or some other relatively meaningless poetical interjection. This gives a wonderful historical context to P.G. Wodehouse's characters greeting each other with a "what, what, what, old thing!". Bertie Wooster was apparently using a construction that dated back a thousand years...)
Norwegian for "what" is "hva", with a silent H. But I swear I can hear a hint of the H sometimes. Also, hvem, hvilken, hvor, hvit for who, which, where, white, &c.
Swedish has dropped the H (along with other differences) giving vad, vem, vilken, var, vita for what, who, which, where, white.
Common heritage, plus latter influences from the Viking era. I'm studying Norwegian (and a bit of Swedish) and the similarities with English are quite interesting. Also, the differences in the form of shifts. Like kvalm (qualm?) meaning queasy/sick.
Tourists from the USA in the UK always sounds funny when pronouncing place names that have "ham" in them. The UK English way of saying these place names is Buckingum and Birmingum, not BuckingHam and BirmingHam.
I would have said BuckingAm myself.
Speaking of the UK, how on earth did Worcester come to be pronounced "Wister". At least that's the way it's pronounced in the U.S. northeast, when referring to the city in central Massachusetts. The Brits threw New England a whole bunch of curveballs.
Surprising that the "words that begin with n" section didn't discuss how the process works both ways. For example the word newt (as in the aquatic amphibian) used to be ewt, but because it was so often prefaced by "an" eventually the n was attached to the ewt. Wikipedia's definition for this process is juncture loss.
If you like this sort of stuff you should definitely check out Slate's Lexicon Valley podcast [1]. Bob Garfield and Mike Vuolo have great chemistry and the content is always interesting.
[1] http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/lexicon_valley.html
Thanks for the link, but holy buckets that's one of the worst pieces of web design I've ever seen. Leave it to web designers to screw up displaying an ordered list.
I come from the same area as the bithplace of william the conqueror and, to my surprise, as I was learning English, I realized that some words sounded the same as the local dialect my grandparents were speaking; such as 'pear' and 'chair', etc...
When I was in school we were reading 'The Crucible'. One lesson we all took turns to read out loud. One of my peers read the word 'whore' as 'war'. Some of the boys sniggered.
The teacher then needed to describe what a whore was.
I think she handled it quite well in hindsight considering she had a bunch if immature teenagers to deal with.
Shakespeare used the phrase "from hour to hour" as a joke to mean "from whore to whore". Doesn't quite work unless you hear it in the Original Pronunciation:
http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=6892
(Also, "war" would rhyme with "far")
We had a teacher named Mrs Hoare, pronounced "whore". She was lovely. She eventually left to be replaced by Mrs Robinson, so handing in homework involved "Here's to you Mrs Robinson!"
but nobody got as far as asking "Are you trying to seduce me Mrs Robinson?"
Recently I've heard several people pronounce the "l" in "salmon" and it actually made me pause to see if I had been saying it wrong all along. General consensus with my Facebook friends was that the "l" should not be pronounced. But now I wonder if it used to be but was lost.
It definitely used to be pronounced.
I've never heard of a word that started out with a silent letter. All silent letters I've come across in my studies have been pronounced in the past.
I could be wrong and if so, that would be very interesting.
I didn't realize that the silent "k" in knife and knight were ever pronounced. Or the "p" in pterodactyl. I'm glad those three aren't making a comeback. :)
knife and knight will have been pronounced with the 'k' originally in english; you can see this in Chaucer. Pterodactyl, being essentially coined by english speakers from classical greek roots, probably never had the 'p' pronounced in english, but it was certainly pronounced in greek.
However, the closest thing I'm aware of to a word "starting out with a silent letter" is debt, which was originally spelled (and pronounced) without the 'b'. The 'b' was added by someone who felt the word should better reflect the latin 'debeo', and was never pronounced at any point.
"Doubt" is another one; borrowed from old French doute in the 13th century, with the "b" added by scribes in the 14th century.
There's a bit in Shakespeare's _Love's Labour's Lost_ where the pedant Holofernes is ranting about how the "b" should be pronounced in those two words, but as you say, it was always silent.
EDIT: Turns out "salmon" and "solder" were originally "saumon" and "soudor", with the "l" added in the 18th century (agsin to reflect the Latin spelling)
I very much enjoyed this quick introduction to Shakespeare in Original Pronunciation (the sound of speech at the time) and how many puns and much interpretation is lost in modern accents. From the Open University: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gPlpphT7n9s
I actually like the fact that English words are spelt more closely to their meaning (/etymology) than pronunciation, since pronunciation shifts. In that way words like debt/debit form semantic clusters (as in the structure of Arabic) even though the former has a silent 'b'. It makes the prosaic language more poetic.
Of course French elevated this spelling conservativism to a fetish, proving that you can go to far.
But I find it sad that languages like German that reform their spelling to make it more phonetic saw away the history and meaning from the words and force you to memorise, rather than deduce, meanings. Likewise teaching English reading via "phonics" ignores the interconnection of the words and makes spelling harder rather than easier.
> Of course French elevated this spelling conservativism to a fetish, proving that you can go to[o] far.
A funny way to respond to English inserting a spurious 'b' into the French dette / dete.
> I find it sad that languages like German that reform their spelling to make it more phonetic saw away the history and meaning from the words and force you to memorise, rather than deduce, meanings
(my emphasis)
This is overstated to the point of complete absurdity. You are always forced to memorize the meanings of words; that's the difference between words and sentences. To a great extent, if you don't have to memorize the meaning, it's not a word. (There are word-level syntax bits, such as arguably the re- prefix to verbs, but really the fact that the meaning is arbitrary is the essence of a word.)
I don't know about that, I think to a great deal it is possible to guess through context and the word what a word means. The number of neologisms produced everyday on reddit must be huge but it doesn't present a problem.
Well remembered. Also "island", the "s" in there is false etymology by trying to relate it to Latin "insula" (my dictionary says it's to relate it to "isle" so take what I say with a grain of salt!); the actual word is "i(eg)land", no "s" to be found.
I was thinking about those "kn" words a few months ago and sat down with a dictionary to see how many there were. I think there were about 20 or so common ones, and every single one has a cognate in Swedish that starts with an audible k, and same for words like gnat. I wonder why English has dropped that sound. Are there exceptions?
Knight's origin in Modern English is the Old English "cniht" [1]. The 'c' was pronounced back then. Similarly, knife comes from Old English "cnif" [2]. It was satisfying, when I took a random Old English course about a decade ago, to find that my deliberate mispronunciations (mostly to annoy the pedants in my social circle) actually had a basis in reality and not just a Monty Python sketch.
English spelling is a product of how people used to pronounce words. So whenever you see "silent letters" it usually means they were pronounced before (although you still need supporting evidence).
As I mention nearby, the 'b' in "debt" was never pronounced. Of course, the word was orginally spelled without it ("dette"), so it's kind of a halfway case.
Usually pronunciations get simplified (deletion, lenition, etc..) however it is possible (though rare) for words to gain new sounds, or regain sounds that were lost or weakened before.
Interesting, I always thought bampot had a first syllable rhyming with "lamp", but would pronounce balm to rhyme with calm. But then I'm from the south of England so bampot isn't a word I'd normally outside of reading Trainspotting...
I think Scots tend to shorten sounds - consider Edinburgh, which locals pronounce "Embra". Only having been here for about 30 years I've only got to the point of referring to it as "Edinbra".
Referring to it as "Eedeeenboooroooo" causes hilarity in local of all levels of seniority.
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.
In a somewhat similar process, 'lead' (pronounced like the element) seems to have replaced 'led' (the participle or the preterite): "She lead the team."
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.
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.
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.
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").
I've often heard people use the term "mute point" instead of "moot point". That seems fairly similar to the borrowing similar words from other languages.
Is that in the US? It would make some sort of sense since 'moot point' has effectively reversed its meaning in US english ('something not for discussion' there). 'Mute' seems to to agree with that sense.
(See also the US meaning of 'table' as in 'postpone for discussion' which has also reversed)
This is basically an overview of what you would learn in a Historical Linguistics course. The reason they focus so much on sounds is because the changes are much more obvious than say, syntactic changes in the language (which can be very subtle).
Yes, usually in such cases the words used to rhyme (and sometimes still do, as with Brits pronouncing "rain" and "again"). Once you know this, pronouncing it any other way feels unfair to the author, as in Sonnet 116 by Shakespeare:
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no; it is an ever-fixed mark,
That looks on tempests, and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wandering bark,
Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken.
Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle's compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom.
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
All of the rhymes were exact in the accent of Shakespeare's day ("original pronunciation", or OP), so reading them today in a "proper" accent makes it seem like the Bard dropped the ball on his rhyme scheme. (For example, in OP "love" rhymes with "remove" and "come" rhymes with "doom".)
Around the age of 11 or so, I heard my daughter, a voracious reader, mispronounce colonel the way it is spelled. When I corrected her she was very upset to the point of arguing with me that I must be wrong.
So we went to the dictionary where we both learned the source of the confusion:
I think that the king of miss-pronunciation is prof. Joseph Stiglitz. The guy is genius but the way he pronounces the words 'state', 'etcetera' and many others is hilarious.
Seeing an article that gives Latin words as an example of English language pronunciation errors makes me shake my head. Seeing that the example given contains an error itself (his "correct" version of "ex-cetera" is "etcetera," where it is supposed to be written as two words, "et cetera") makes me bang my head into my desk—twice.
Words (or phrases) like "et cetera" are so commonly in use that they are effectively English, despite their origins. Otherwise, what's left of English?
My English teacher told me that "You" is now pronounced like that because the "th" in "Thou" used to have its own character, which looked a lot like the Y.
Merriam Webster differs:
You -- Middle English, from Old English ēow, dative & accusative of gē you; akin to Old High German iu, dative of ir you, Sanskrit yūyam you
First Known Use: before 12th century
Thou -- Middle English, from Old English thū; akin to Old High German dū thou, Latin tu, Greek sy
First Known Use: before 12th century
So "thou" is cognate with German "du", and "you" is related to German "ihr", the plural of "sie", if I'm understanding this correctly.
Yup, you're right and I was, let's say, 99% wrong. (The 1% comes from the fact that "you" and "vos" and "vous" are all related -- but "you" is a cousin of both, not a descendant.)
Still no way it's got anything to do with writing "thou" with a thorn at the front and misreading it as a "y", though.
Fun fact: An acceptable, albeit dated, spelling of "et cetera" is "&c". Since et cetera literally means "and so forth," you can contract it into "& cetera," or "&c".
And that symbol is called 'ampersand' but originally was just 'and'. The alphabet song used to include it at the end (w, x, y and z, and per se 'and'). So 'ampersand' is supposed to be a corruption much like 'Saint Nicholas' turned into 'Santa Claus'. Or is this apocryphal?
* In the "words that begin with an n" category he didn't include the most famous example: orange, the fruit, which has an n in Persian and Arabic from which it was borrowed but lost it (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orange_(fruit)#Etymology)
* I used to think that baby was the actual word and babe was a corruption, turns out most probably it was just the reverse (baby < babe + y) (http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/44883/was-baby-or...)
* Somewhat related to the last category: Have you ever wondered why the initial sound in chair and chandelier are pronounced differently in English? There was a sound change in French, chair was borrowed before that change and chandelier, like many other French word that start with ch, after that change.
* According to OED the reason that some animal names have the same singular and plural was that they originally contained a long vowel, e.g. deer, sheep, fish. Turns out, horse was also in this group but after a sound change its vowel shortened, hence the -s plural now.