Tagged Questions
9
votes
4answers
647 views
Why did “insofar” become a word, not “insofaras”?
So I'm thinking about how "insofar" became a word. This slightly unfair comparison shows that it happened relatively recently.
Now, whenever I've seen it written, "insofar" is followed by "as". So ...
19
votes
3answers
640 views
Old English instead of Latin in early Britain
For almost 400 years, Britain was a Roman province. During that period, naturally, Latin was an important language in the region. When the Germanic tribes invaded the British Isles (around the 5th ...
4
votes
1answer
632 views
Good and bad - suppletive adjectives
In English, there are three suppletive adjectives: good, bad and far. Their comparative and superlative forms derive from different stems, i.e., we have best instead of *goodest, worse instead of ...
7
votes
3answers
602 views
Was what happened to the pronunciation of the word “church”, as compared to the Scots-English “kirk”, a general phenomenon in Middle English?
The other day, I was reading a history of the Norman and Angevin kings, and came across the word kirk in an ecclesiastical context, which I had to look up, having no clue of its meaning. The Online ...
11
votes
2answers
1k views
Is the history of h-dropping in English in any way related to the silent h of French?
I was reading up on Richard the III, and his exploits just now in Wikipedia — as is the nature of Wiki, that further me led to stumble to Stafford, Duke of Buckingham's page, where I learned ...
13
votes
3answers
789 views
When and why did the letter “u” begin being called [ju]?
We pronounce the name of the twenty-first letter of the alphabet homophonically with the word you.
Was this what the letter was always called (ever since the analogous letter in Latin), or did it at ...
10
votes
5answers
4k views
Where does “ta!” come from?
Where does the expression "ta" come from?
Wikipedia has only this to say:
"ta!", slang, Exclam. Thank you! {Informal}, an expression of gratitude
but no additional information or links about ...
