Blog 1 Introduction 1
Are you interested in words, their origin and their sounds?
Here is the first of a series of blogs to broaden and deepen your knowledge and interest.
We start with just one word: ‘footpedal’.
What’s so interesting about that? Let’s take it to bits.
It’s obviously made up of two common words, ‘foot’ and ‘pedal’, both of which share some reference to feet, as, for example, does the similar-looking word ‘pedestrian’.
Now let’s look at the sounds of ‘foot’ and of the common element in ‘pedal’ and ‘pedestrian’, that is ‘ped-’.
Both start with a sound that engages your lip: ‘f’ is pronounced by bringing your lower lip to meet your upper teeth, ‘p’ by closing and then opening both lips. For now, let’s call them ‘lip-sounds’.
The vowels don’t match, but the next consonant in each word again has a close link. Both are articulated by touching the ridge behind your upper teeth with the tip of your tongue. For now, let’s call them ‘tip of the tongue’ sounds. The tongue position is identical: the difference is that your vocal chords are engaged for ‘d’ but not for ‘t’. You can easily feel this when you say the sounds ‘d’ and ‘t’ in sequence.
So why would English have two words, both referring to feet, and both sharing the same broad type of initial and second consonant?
Of course, this might just be coincidence. But there are many other ‘f/p’ matches – we will call such matches ‘doublets’ – among words that you know well. Try your hand at the following, always considering just the first two consonants. These need to be either identical or clearly similar, as with ‘lip-sounds’ or ‘tip of the tongue-sounds’, or in one case ’sh’/’s’:
- Find an English word beginning with ‘p’ that shares a general meaning with:
- Father
- Ford (as in a water crossing: the match also involves water, but also a place for arriving and departing)
- Fish
- Fear
- Find an English word beginning with ‘f’ that shares a general meaning with:
- Plenary/plenitude
- Pyre
- Platy-pus (consider only the first element, which is by origin an adjective meaning ‘broad’: the second is another relative of ‘foot’ and ‘ped-‘, and does indeed originally mean ‘foot’. This egg-laying mammal is thus a ‘broad-foot’)
- Ptero-dactyl (again, consider only the first element, which relates to birds: the second part has the original meaning of ‘a finger’)
Now that you have identified these additional ‘f/p’ doublets, here are two questions for you to reflect on:
- Do you see any broad difference in character between the words beginning with ‘f’ and the words beginning with ‘p’?
- Why would a single language have two sets of words that have a general similarity in meaning and sounds, even if each has its own more specific usage?