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.
2594: cancer & crabs Jan 21, 2022
Cancer is known to be related to crabs because of the zodiac symbol, but the relation is much deeper in fact. The word 'cancer', which now particularly associated with the disease, is because the enlarged veins around cancerous tumors were thought to look like the the legs of crabs. In Latin 'cancer' means 'crab', which itself is from Ancient Greek καρκίνος (karkínos) via metathesis. This is also where the word 'canker' is from, as well as 'chancre', both types of ulcers.
2459: Semitic Definite Article Sep 5, 2021
Two Semitic languages, Hebrew and Arabic, have on the surface two differently sourced definite articles, ה־ (ha-) in Hebrew and ٱلْـ (al-) in Arabic, but some linguistics think otherwise. They surmise that originally there was a form هل۔/הל־ (hal-) used in a proto-Semitic language and as they two diverged, this form did as well, splitting in two separate ways. Not everyone agrees with this, and even those who would agree to the idea principle, they propose different forms. Some of these include in Arabic لا (lā) either through metathesis or as a different particle that eventually took on the meaning of a determiner.
2398: pomegranate Jul 13, 2021
Pomegranate is pretty clearly involving the root of the French 'pomme' (Latin 'pomum') meaning 'apple' or more accurately 'fruit' but it is less clear about the second element. Some say this is from the Latin 'granatum' meaning 'seeds' from the root of *gre-no- (grain) but this is not the only theory. Part of the difficulty there is that the word used to be 'poumgarnet' and the '-gra-' came to be through metathesis, so to go on this etymology which does certainly have some historic backing would require two rounds of metathesis on the same term. Still, names including the Latin 'mālum grānātum' (seeded apple) and mālum Punicum (Punic apple) are attested historically, so this may just be so. The scientific name is Punica granatum, in line somewhat with the Roman naming.
2135: Metathesis as a Grammatical Feature Oct 19, 2020
Metathesis is a process that can affect words from any language, and involves the sounds internally moving around, but not every language does it for the same reason. Some fairly innocuous English examples include 'nuclear' to something like 'nucular' /ˈnjuːkjʊlər/ or 'asterisk' like 'asterix' /ˈæstərɪks/. In Hebrew, there are a few examples of this in loanwords like נמל (namél) from the Greek λιμήν (limḗn), and how the Bible contains both כֶּֽבֶשׂ (keves) and כֶּֽשֶׂב (kesev) to mean 'lamb'. Moreover even in normal cases it is actually a part of the grammar. The binyan hitpael used for reflexive verbs actually demonstrates metathesis with the prefix (hit-) and the first consonant of the stem when there is an alveolar fricative. For instance, this occurs with:
סכל (skl) --> הִסְתַּכֵּל (histakkēl) = "he looked at..."
where the T (תַּ) follows the S (ס), but this does not happen with
לבש (lbš) --> הִתְלַבֵּש (hitlabbēš) = "he got dressed"
1010: metathesis Sep 14, 2017
Most of the time, when an affix is added to a word, the root word is pronounced the same way. Occasionally, the presence of one sound will influence another, which is why the prefix 'in-' becomes 'il-' in 'illegal', but these changes are fairly predictable and consistent. Other times, the individual sounds of a word will not change, but may shift somewhat due to certain influences. For instance, 'comfort' is usually pronounced /kəmfɚt/ in Standard American English, but despite the spelling, most people with the same accent would pronounce 'comfortable' with the sound represented with R following the sound represented by T, /kəmftɚbəl/. There are a few reasons that this process, known as 'metathesis', occurs, including mishearing the word, but in this case the cause is likely that it is physically easier to say the word as /kəmftɚbəl/, which reduces the number of syllables, and also requires less movement by the tongue. Other metathesized words include 'ask' as /æks/, which has occurred for at least a thousand years in different dialects, and 'pretty' as /pɚdi/ present in Southern American English, with the first vowel shifting towards the front. If you know any yourselves, write a comment.