Questions tagged [historical-change]
For questions about how the English language has changed over time.
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Why did "pigeon" replace the native word "culver"?
Pigeon is a borrowing from Anglo-Norman where the etymons are French pigon, pigeon. The earliest citation is found in Middle English, from 1375 per OED:
1375
Thomas Blont..hath indowed Dame Isabell.....
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Was the o in "go" and oe in "toe" pronounced differently in early 19th century Gloucestershire English?
No modern dialect makes the <o> and <oe> distinction, but when reading Medhurst's Hokkien dictionary of 1832 i came across (page 34)
Furthermore, <o> seems to be a monophthong and &...
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Why do people say a dog is 'harmless' but not 'harmful'?
I'm not asking if people consider dogs dangerous or not, I'm asking about how the words 'harmless' or 'harmful' are used.
Did the distinction on how the words are used arise at some point? One could ...
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Eighteenth-century pronounciation of "wax"
In "Against Idleness and Mischief"(1715) ("How doth the little busy bee"), Isaac Watts rhymes "wax" and "makes".
Were these two words pronounced the same at the ...
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How did "oxen" (plural of "ox") survive as the only plural form with the Old English plural ending -en?
Oxen is a rare exception in English where it is the only common English word that retains the original Old English plural ending -en. (Note: Children and brethren are formed a bit differently, please ...
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What would 'ent'/'eont' be in Modern English? [closed]
Based on typical changes, what would the Middle English word 'eont', derived from the Old English 'ent', have become in Modern English, if this word had survived?
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Is there a documented merger or split responsible for whether or not people treat lair and layer as homophones, and if so, what is it called?
Discovered a weird bit of pronunciation distinction in friends today, between three words:
lair (as in home to monster)
layer (as in levels of a cake)
layer (as in "one who lays things down"...
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What is a "pussy" when the word is used to describe a piece of British Army uniform in 1939?
I am currently transcribing and sharing my grandparents WW2 correspondence between 1939 and 1945.
My question is in relation to this letter written on November 24th 1939.
On page 3 my grandfather ...
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Origin and evolution of the proverb "A closed mouth catches no flies"
"A closed mouth catches no flies" is a proverb, and the origins of proverbs are almost always strange and murky; I'm not really expecting a definitive answer here. Wiktionary attributes the ...
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In Indian English, did the word 'griffin' ever mean newcomer or novice?
I recently came across a definition in the dictionary Hobson-Jobson. It's basically a big collection of English words and anglicizations used or found in India. The entry that's been stumping me is ...
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Usage of "high school" and "secondary school" in British Columbia
I grew up in British Columbia, Canada. In the area where I grew up (Greater Vancouver), the school system was generally separated into elementary and high school, with elementary starting at ...
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History of "via"
I was wondering about different ways of writing "via" when a graph of this word's usage showed up.
There is a peak in the years 1529-32 and then a sudden decline then again a peak at 1632 ...
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Why do some irregular verbs, such as swing/swung and sting/stung, only have two forms instead of three?
Folks, my question has to do with really difficult things to understand, so I've chosen this forum and think only truly wise owls are able to help me.
As you, I hope, know, lots of English irregular ...
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"Tranche" as synonym for "collection"
Recently there have been a tranche (:/) of news articles referring to a "tranche of documents" found in Donald Trump's possession. Most dictionaries, e.g., Merriam-Webster
a division or ...
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Why are long e and o most prone to be diphthongised by English speakers?
As a teacher of languages, it has struck me how English vowels love not just diphthongs, but even triphthongs, and this tendency presents itself in how native English speakers generally tend to ...
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Are "orange" and "ginger" synonymous (cat color)?
I recently watched a movie A street cat named Bob, where the cat was described as ginger cat.
I thought the color of the cat is described as orange, too. (confirmed with google image search)
The ...
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How did "ought" lose its original usage as the past tense of "owe"?
Ought is originally the past tense of owe (v.). It appears that this usage is retained in Scottish and in some dialects of English. The current use of ought in standard English is a modal auxiliary (...
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Emergence of “got it sorted”
I grew up in England (in the Midlands, in the 1960s) and if there was some issue or confusion that I had successfully resolved, I would have said “I sorted it out”, or “I got it sorted out”.
I haven’t ...
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Why did English start verbalizing Latin past participles, not keep nativizing infinitive suffixes like it used to do to French verbs? [closed]
The way English adapted French verbs used to be quite straightforward: swap the French infinitive suffixes with Middle English -en:
Latin crīdāre > Old French crier > Middle English crien (13th ...
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How did -ing become a suffix for both present participles and nouns derived from verbs?
In non-modern and non-Middle-English Germanic languages, present participles and nouns derived from verbs look and sound very different:
English: wend - wending - wending
Middle English: wenden - ...
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Pattern to Old English verbs-of-making-adjective?
The other night (after hearing someone on TV say "smoothen"), I noticed that a fair number of Anglo-Saxon-derived adjectives tend to come in pairs where the more "distinguished" or ...
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'To lie' and 'to lay' / 'to rise' and 'to raise' / 'to fall' and 'to fell' <-- Did English used to have more pairs like this?
My understanding is that there aren't many pairs of intransitive and transitive verbs in modern English. Off-hand, I know of three (though I think there are more):
lie vs lay
rise vs raise
fall vs ...
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Is "different than" ungrammatical? [closed]
THIS IS NOT A DUPLICATE QUESTION. This question does not duplicate that question that is cited that this question is a duplicate of, as was already fully explored and explained in the body of this ...
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When and why did the word "pasta" become commonly used?
I remember sometime around 1980 that people started calling pasta... "pasta". I was in a used book store this past weekend and stumbled across two copies of the Better Homes and Gardens New ...
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"Dementia" today vs 100 years ago -- did it mean the same thing?
I know that words for mental illnesses have changed quite a bit in the past century or so. Informally, I think most people see a difference between "crazy" and "unintelligent" ...
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Why do some folk songs from 1930s Appalachia pronounce the word 'Jordan' as 'Jerdon'?
In two songs I've listened to recently, "River of Jordan" by The Carter Family (1929-1932) and "Wayfaring Stranger" by Doc Watson (1992, but was almost certainly first played much ...
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Can obsolete words be reintroduced? [closed]
I personally really like to use the word overmorrow. It is convenient to use, and much shorter compared to the traditionally used the day after tomorrow.
However, according to this answer the word has ...
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What is the original semantic difference between "projectile" and "missile"?
Let consider context (e.g. historical recent past) where modern meaning of missile as a self-propelled ordinance with reactive or jet engine doesn't exist.
Then its original meaning is "an ...
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Origin of 'go (off) on a jag'
We used to use this expression in upstate New York during the 1970s..as in
jag (noun)
a bout of drinking or drug taking
Vocabulary.com
To "be on a jag" or "go on a jag" means to ...
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Why are typewriter keys referred to as “stops”, especially when compared to organ stops?
I have been listing to an audio book of The Hound of the Baskervilles. In it there is a line which says “…with her fingers over the typewriter stops…”. I am assuming this is referring to the keys of ...
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When did "sink" start referring to the tap as well?
A current TikTok trend involves someone asking another person to "turn off the sink". In a play with the term "turn off", the second person then goes to the sink and says something ...
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What is the history of the incomplete "can"/"could" verb?
The verb can/could is incomplete in the following sense. There is a present tense:
I can
You can
He/she/it can
[…]
There is also a past tense:
I could
You could
He/she/it could
[…]
But there is ...
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Why is "should" used instead of "would" all over The Fellowship of the Ring? [duplicate]
Over and over again, the author uses "should" where "would" would be right:
I don’t know half of you half as well as I should like; and I like less than half of you half as well ...
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Origin of "the likes of which X has [or have or had] never seen"
One of Donald Trump's favorite rhetorical flourishes was (and perhaps still is) the wording "the likes of which X has [or have] never seen." While president, he used it on a number of ...
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What is the origin of "huge"?
What is the origin of the word huge (adj. and adv.) meaning "very great, large, or big; immense, enormous, vast"?
Both OED and Etymonline say that it might be from an Old French word which ...
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Why do we use two different verb forms for sentences like “that person is broke” versus “that person is broken”?
We usually use only a verb’s past participle when we
need to make an adjective out of it, not its past
tense—but not always. Sometimes we even use both forms
but assign these two different meanings!
...
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Has the word individual 'outcompeted' that of person historically?
Would it be correct to say that the word individual have 'outcompeted' that of person since 17th century in everyday English, as well as in social sciences?
According to etymonline.com's entry on ...
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English words ending with -enk/-eng
Why aren’t words ending with -enk/-eng more common in Modern English?
user439754
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When and why did English stop pronouncing ‘hour’ with an [h] like its spelling still shows?
As a non-native speaker, I had been pronouncing hour
in the literal, letter-by-letter way as [ˈhaʊə(ɹ)].
Then I learned that its written h is silent in
speech, and that you therefore needed to say an ...
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How did English come to use a writing system which makes spelling it so hard?
Alphabetic writing systems use graphemes to represent
phonemes. But in their “Psychology of Reading”
chapter
of 2003’s Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science,
researchers Simon Garrod and Meredyth Daneman
...
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Why is the verb "Pilot" capitalized in Robinson Crusoe?
The following is an excerpt from Robinson Crusoe (Oxford World's Classics, p39).
my Business was to hold my Breath, and raise my self upon the Water, if I could; and so by swimming to preserve my ...
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What is a 'Jack' (as in Jack, Queen, King') ? When was it so designated?
In Charles Dicken's Great Expectations, published in 1861, when Pip, the hero, plays cards with his friend Estella, the narrative states :
“He calls the knaves Jacks, this boy!” said Estella with ...
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When did the California Vowel Shift begin?
When did the California Vowel Shift begin: as soon as California was settled by English speakers? Or did it develop later?
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How did the name pronunciation of the letter Z as 'zee' become the consensus in American English?
According to Wikipedia as well as my own experiences interacting with people of different nationalities, the pronunciation of 'Z' seems to have maintained some variation of the hard t- sound from the ...
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How do clichés evolve and change?
I'm unsure if this isn't better suited for Literature SE, so bear with me, I'll take it over there if voted to close.
A friend shared an image with me where someone was complaining that Pride and ...
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He had his ears bored
I’m reading The Underground Railroad by Coleson Whitehead. Early in the first chapter he writes:
“Her last husband had his ears bored for stealing honey. The wounds gave up pus until he wasted away.”
...
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Origin of stating indirect object by sentence structure and no pronoun
Background
Consider the following from The Punisher season 2, with names replaced to avoid spoilers:
― Where is Donna, Jim? You tell me where she is, maybe I can pull your ass out of the fire with ...
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What caused the changes in pronunciation of the hard "G" in "Los Angeles"?
I know there was a long debate about whether "Los Angeles" should be pronounced like the English (soft-G, as in "jelly") or the Spanish (heavy-H as in "Jose"), and given ...
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What did post-vocalic r sound like in the UK before it died out?
As far as I understand it most UK dialects became non-rhotic at some point in the 19th century - but was the r sound previously heard in words like park similar to today's American pronunciation, or ...
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"If it were not for" and "if it had not been for": Which is more traditional?
Some use "if it were not for" to mean both the present and the past events, while others use "if it had not been for" for the past. For the former, see Oxford and be (verb) in OALD....
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