Technical Note 3: Types of Sound Change
Box 1: Phonetic Context (1): Metathesis
‘Metathesis’ is Greek for placing something somewhere different, or, more pithily, ‘sound-swapping’. Here, the first four sounds appear in the order ‘s-k-i-r’ in ‘skirmish but ‘s-k-r-i’ in ‘scrimmage’, the ‘r’ and the ‘i’ swapping places.
A similar example, also swapping the order of an ‘r’ and an ‘i’, is the word ‘third’ as opposed to ‘three’.
The sound ‘r’ is particularly prone to be involved in sound-swapping, though you will see later examples involving other sounds as well.
Box 2: The Effects of Analogy (1)
Why do we ‘chew’ with our ‘jaw’?
The first word, as with so many other ‘ch-’ words, goes back to a PGmc *k. The second, which is from the same root, would be expected to give us ‘chaw’, but seems, like its close relation ‘jowl’, to have been affected by the French word for ‘cheek’, ‘joue’.
This shows that closely-related meanings can sometimes override normal ‘sound-rules’. It is an example of ‘analogy’ (Technical Note 2), where a different logic affects a sound change that would otherwise have been expected. We can call this type ‘semantic analogy’. More examples will come our way when we reach PIE *d.
Box 3: Folk Etymology (1)
Erroneous beliefs about the meanings of words can sometimes affect their sounds. Known as ‘folk etymology’, a classic case is the way that French has borrowed the German word for pickled cabbage: ‘sauerkraut’. The first part, clearly related to English ‘sour’, was interpreted as the ‘cabbage’ element (French ‘chou’), while ‘kraut’ (German for ‘cabbage’) was reinterpreted as the French for ‘crust’: ‘croȗte’, giving the rather strange term in French of ‘choucroȗte’ or literally ‘cabbage crust’. Apart from ‘meerkat’ above, you will come across several examples in subsequent blogs.
Box 4: Phonetic Context (2): Assimilation
Some sounds ‘go well together’: for example, it’s easier to pronounce an ‘m’ before a ‘p’ or ‘b’ and an ‘n’ before a ‘t’ or ‘d’, as fewer changes in articulation are needed than in a sequence like ‘mt’ or ‘np’.
That’s why we see words like ‘embittered’, where the first element goes back to an earlier *en. The particular case of nasals matching immediately following consonants is usually regular across all similar words in a language.
There are however several types of ‘assimilation’, as such changes are called. One of the more radical is the change of a consonant to match a preceding or subsequent consonant across an intervening vowel, as we shall see when we look at the numeral 5 later.
Box 5: Phonetic Context (3): False Word-Division
As we know, the English indefinite article ‘a’ adds an ‘n’ when the following noun starts with a vowel. This opens the way to misinterpretation of the word-boundary.
Here’s a case in point.
The manufacturers of a well-known chocolate biscuit called ‘Penguin’ enliven the product by including on each packet a riddle about penguins. The other day, I faced the question, ‘Why was the penguin popular?’ The answer (apologies if you are about to open one) is ‘Cos he was an ice guy’. The joke works because ‘an ice’ sounds just like ‘a nice’.
Here are some more straight-faced examples where changed word-division involving ‘a’ and ‘an’ has either subtracted an original ‘n’ from the start of a word, or added one to it.
- The French word ’nappe’ (which means ‘tablecloth’) has provided two words in English, each referring to a textile product also related to food. These are ‘napkin’ and ‘apron’. The former shows the expected initial ‘n’, but ‘apron’ has lost it because ‘a napron’ was misconstrued as ‘an apron’.
- We talk of ‘an adder’ when the inherited word for ‘snake’ was actually ‘nadder’ (as in the River Nadder – ‘Snake River’ – in Wiltshire).The grass snake’s species name is ‘Natrix Natrix’, from the Latin for water snake, showing the initial ‘n’ that English has lost.
- The word ‘navel’ is related to the now seldom-used word ‘nave’ in the sense of the hub of a wooden wheel. In Proto-Germanic, the tool for making the vital hole in a nave for the axle was given the very logical description of *naba-gaizaz, which means literally ‘nave-piercer’. This developed into Old English nafo-gar, and should have given modern English ‘nauger’. However ‘a nauger’ became wrongly thought of as ‘an auger’, which is how the tool is currently described.
- It’s the same with the ‘orange’. The name of this fruit ‘should’ have started with an ‘n’, as conserved in Spanish ‘naranja’, a borrowing from Arabic (and indeed earlier borrowed by Arabic from sources in Asia). However, French, which like English has an indefinite article ending in ‘n’, mis-divided the word so that ‘un norange’ became ‘un orange’, and that’s the form that English borrowed as this exotic fruit arrived in Britain.
- As a contrary example, we talk of ‘a newt’ when the inherited word for this amphibian was ‘an eft’.
This kind of change is more likely when the word in question is imported, as with ‘apron’ and ‘orange’, or not very often used, as with ‘adder’ and ‘newt’, or indeed ‘auger’. It would be much more surprising if ‘nice’ were ever to go the same way!
Box 6: Folk Etymology (2)
The Welsh word ‘maen’ lurks behind many apparently English place names like the Old Man of Coniston or some examples of ‘Hangman Hill’, where folk etymology (Box 2, Technical Note 3) has obscured the origin of the term anglicized as ‘man’. The ‘old’ in the former is similarly a misinterpretation of Welsh ‘allt’, related to the Latin adjective meaning ‘high’ seen in borrowings like ‘altitude’. So the shapely fell is not an ‘Old Man’ but a ‘High Stone’.
Box 7: Phonetic Context (4): Dissimilation
In Box 4 (Blog post 12), we described the way in which speakers of a language may alter one sound to be more like another (‘Assimilation’). Less frequently, speakers may however do the opposite. The switch of n>m before another ‘n’ in ‘gymnasium’ in Blog post 13 is an example, and the change of *dl (both articulated with a very similar tongue position – try it!) to Greek ‘gl’ in ‘glyko-’ is another.
Similar examples include:
In Latin, the word ‘meridian’ comes from the two words ‘middle’ (Latin ‘medio-’) and ‘day’ (Latin ‘dies’), where the ‘d’ of ‘medio-’ has been dissimilated to an ‘r’.
In French, the Latin word ‘peregrinus’ (which means ‘foreigner’ or ‘stranger’ and was the term used under the Roman Empire for subjects without the rights of Roman Citizenship) had its first ‘r’ altered to ‘l’, as in English borrowing ‘pilgrim’.
In English, examples include ‘purple’, where the ‘l’ replaces a second ‘r’ in the Latin/French word from which it is taken.
Box 8:Giraldus Cambrensis on ‘Salt’
The Welsh cleric and antiquary, Giraldus Cambrensis (died around 1223), makes an interesting comment on the initial consonant of this and other ‘s/h’words, showing early awareness of relationships across languages.
He writes: ‘Salt is ‘hals’ in Greek and ‘halen in Welsh’ (which he then attributes to the Britons staying in Greece after leaving their mythical homeland in Troy). He continues, ‘It seems remarkable to me that I do not find so many languages agree as much over any other word as they do in this: ‘hals’ in Greek, ‘halen’ in Welsh, ‘halgein’ in Irish, where g is inserted, and ‘sal’ in Latin, where, as Priscian tells us, s replaces the aspirate in some words. Just as ‘hals’ corresponds to ‘sal’ in Latin, so ‘hemi’ [Greek] is ‘semi’ [Latin] and ‘hepta’ is ‘septem’ [‘hepta’ and ‘septem’ are the Greek and Latin for the number 7]. In French the word becomes ‘sel’, the vowel a changing to e as it develops from Latin. In English a ‘t’ is added to make ‘salt’, and in German the word is ‘sout’. In short, you have seven languages, or even eight, which agree completely over this word.’
It’s particularly noteworthy that Giraldus recognises the wider ‘equivalence’ of Greek initial ‘h’ and Latin ‘s’. However, Giraldus seems to have misconceived the Irish word, which is in fact ‘salann’, conserving the PIE initial *s.