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Adding a sound segment to a word without changing its meaning is one of the many English pas
stimes. English speakers add a vowel (as in /fɪləm/ for film) or 'stretch' a hamster by calling it /hæmpstə/. This insertion process is often called
epenthesis. Some academics use instead the terms
anaptyxis (adding a vowel, the so-called
svarabhakti vowel, between consonants) and
excrescence (adding a consonant between consonants). If you add a sound segment word-initially (e.g. Latin
status became Spanish
estado), we call this
prosthesis or
prothesis; glueing a sound to the end is called
paragoge. Would the change from
among to
amongst be an example (with -st being an old genitival ending)? Can anyone out there come up with an English word exemplifying
present-day pro(s)thesis?
BTW: You get the pun in the blog title, don't you?
So what do you call an excrescent consonant in writing, e.g. passtime instead of the established spelling pastime?
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure that this qualifies as a real example of "present-day prothesis" -- because the two pronunciations are to some extent differentiated in many contexts -- but some people express their "especial thanks" while others give just their "special thanks".
ReplyDelete@Anonymous: Sorry for the typo and thanks for pointing it out to me! In the 19th c. the spelling with double s was well-established.
ReplyDeletePetr, are you trying to tell us I'm not the only dusty relic round here?
DeleteSidney, you should see the dust cloud whenever I shake myself
Delete@Kevin: especial is a less common English adjective with senses that are nowadays more commonly expressed by special. OED lists phrases such as 'my especial friend', 'especial importance', 'especial reference'.
ReplyDeleteI'm familiar with this in diachronic phonetics, but there's always a first time for any sound change. I'm not aware of any example of a modern prothetic development. There are the classic examples like ward/guard, that are, respectively, part of the Germanic heritage and a version that came via AngloNorman with a prothetic g.
ReplyDeletePS our English master at school in the late 1940s was the first to tell me that; he was also the one who told us our local dialect was Estuary English, nearly 40 years before Rosewarne coined it (the name, not the dialect).
DeleteHad he been still alive he could have claimed to be the first to have spotted and coined the name for this chimera of a dialect.
DeleteI'd always assumed our English master had read about Estuary English somewhere authoritative. The dialect isn't a chimera, there are too many people in the home counties who speak it. The name might be a chimera for such a large population, and Gimson called it Southern British English in the 1960s. Rosewarne might have had two phenomena in mind, one is the number of university graduates appearing in high office or public life by the 1970s or 1980s without acquiring RP on the way (Gimson's SBE people), the other are those RP people who are doing their best to acquire SBE, like RH PM you wrote about recently. Estuary English had already happened by 1889 when Ellis reported he couldn't find Kentish dialect anywhere, so Dickens was probably familiar with it. I grew up with both feet in the est'ry mud so I'm content to claim it as my dialect, but for people in Hants or Berks it must seem odd, their London features must have reached them from a very different direction.
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