Timeline for Was the pronunciation of “symmetry” different in the past?
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| Jun 15, 2020 at 7:40 | history | edited | CommunityBot |
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| Jan 25, 2017 at 18:04 | comment | added | Quuxplusone | "I think the period is more likely, because somebody would be more likely to correct this line to be in accord with today's punctuation than the reverse." — This principle is so generally applicable that it has a name: lectio difficilior potior. | |
| Dec 23, 2014 at 13:37 | comment | added | Peter Shor | @Erik: when Philip Francis wrote this, the conventions for punctuation were quite different. I don't think you can conclude anything from today's punctuation rules. (And in fact, I think the period is more likely, because somebody would be more likely to correct this line to be in accord with today's punctuation than the reverse.) | |
| Dec 23, 2014 at 5:07 | comment | added | Erik Kowal | I have seen the period which concludes the line "(That with some trivial Faults unequal flows.)" rendered elsewhere either as a comma or absent altogether. (Which punctuation belongs to the definitive version of the poem – assuming there is one – I have been unable to determine with certainty.) At any rate, it seems to me that the period must be extraneous, since it occurs in a parenthesized aside and also makes the grammatical construction of the parent sentence appear incoherent. | |
| Dec 23, 2014 at 4:15 | history | edited | tchrist♦ | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Dec 23, 2014 at 4:07 | history | edited | tchrist♦ | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Dec 22, 2014 at 21:42 | vote | accept | Jorge Hounie | ||
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| Dec 22, 2014 at 17:31 | comment | added | Peter Shor | So for Pope and his contemporaries, line and join would at least have been very good near-rhymes. | |
| Dec 22, 2014 at 17:22 | comment | added | Peter Shor | as line was moving in the Great Vowel Shift from /iː/ to /aɪ/, it passed very close to the vowel of join, /ɔɪ/, so they actually merged in some dialects during the late 17th century. In fact, they were still merged in some dialects in Dickens' time, as you can see in Great Expectations, when Joe says "Somebody must keep the pot a-biling, Pip, or the pot won't bile, don't you know?" | |
| Dec 22, 2014 at 17:14 | history | edited | tchrist♦ | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Dec 22, 2014 at 17:05 | history | edited | tchrist♦ | CC BY-SA 3.0 |
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| Dec 22, 2014 at 16:55 | history | answered | tchrist♦ | CC BY-SA 3.0 |