2753: -R- Moves Around: Metathesis Jul 4, 2024

There are mainly two ways that pronunciations in a particular society change; a sound shift can affect the way that a particular consonant or vowel is produced in words, or words will change individually. There are a few gray-areas though, such as how -R- has historically had a tendency to move after a vowel it once preceded in a process known as metathesis (i.e. sounds swapping within a word), a trend affecting many individual words but not enough to be considered a sound shift. For example, historically, ‘bird’ was brid, ‘horse’ was hros, and this is starting to be seen in words like ‘prescription articulated more as perscription, among many other examples, old and modern. In one notable case, the word ‘curd’ was originally crud, but ‘crud’ remained its own word with a completely different meaning, gaining its additional slang senses in the mid-20th century.