Sometimes metathesis is due to mishearing, as when it occurs in the speech of young children despite the fact that older people around them pronounce the word differently. On the other hand, it also does happen that children will use a nonstandard pronunciation without realizing it, e.g.
In the situation of this quasi-zombie being with us again: could I submit a thought about “supposably”, as in the heading and OP?
“Supposedly” of course means “people suppose this, but they do so – or may do so – wrongly”. “Supposably” is, for sure, a botch of that word in that sense; but IMO it deserves to be a legitimate word in its own right: signifying “One could reasonably suppose / it could make sense to suppose [whatever]”. I see it as filling here, a possibly useful niche, expressing in one word a thought which would otherwise take several. Occasionally, in writing or speaking informally, I use “supposably” in that sense – doing my tiny bit in the direction of popularising it.
ETA: I realize the above example isn’t one of metathesis, or even mishearing on closer inspection. Better examples would be “amblee-ance” instead of ambulance, or “reglee-er” instead of regular. Even now, I still remember that this was how I heard those words when I was very young.
Much like “hopefully” in the sense of “it is to be hoped”. Although that’s supposed to be incorrect, we don’t really have a good alternative for everyday discourse.
One problem with introducing “supposably” as a legitimate word with its own nuanced meaning would be that it’s the opposite of what usually seems to happen–e.g. in informal discourse, given two phonetically similar words with two distinct meanings, the more common of the two begins to be used for both meanings while the less common word is edged out. Witness “flaunt” and “flout”, for example.
And I get all annoyed at the frequent confusing of “stanch” and “staunch” – even by supposably professional journalists.
Absolutely disgusting. “Staunching the flow…” Even worse, some will pronounce it “stauncheen” because it’s too much work to pronounce the final “ing”. It’s driveen me up the fuckeen wall…
Yes, there is that consideration – it’s a thing which people definitely tend to do. Poor old “flout” would indeed seem to be on its deathbed. Also – admittedly getting away from pronunciation and into spelling – there are phonetically similar words, or outright homophones, which people seem to mix up impartially, in both directions. An instance which annoys the heck out of me and makes me want to shout “get it right, you idiots !”, is “horde” (large bunch of aggressive barbarians) / “hoard” (amassing of wealth). Oddly, with compound words from the latter (hoarder, hoarding): use and spelling seem pretty well always to be correct.
Another, more on-track, which has come to mind: “tenet” (principle / article of belief / strong opinion, which one mentally holds to) seems nowadays in danger of extinction – people appear very inclined to the mistaken application for this meaning, of the similar-sounding / looking “tenant”.
So, when I was three and wanted to go to the zoo to see the “nelephants”, I was right all along?
Well, not really, since the etymology of ‘elephant’ is from ‘elephas’…but if you’d stuck to your guns you could have been on the cutting edge of a lexical change! (Though, probably not.)
The term for a feathered vertebrate used to be spelled “brid” and pronounced /bɹɪd/. Now of course it’s “bird.”
The word “girl” used to mean a subadult human regardless of sex. Now it means a female subadult human, or, loosely. any female human, but never a male.
In Britain, the word “lieutenant” is pronounced /lɛfˈtɛnənt/.
Language changes over time.
Actually, in a case like that, I would definitely use “thee,” not so much because of the following vowel sound, but for emphasis (much like I would use the “ay” pronciation of “a” if I wanted to emphasize the singular nature of the noun I am modifying), and it’s been studied that in hesitated speech, many English speakers unconsciously switch to the “thee” pronunciation, anyway.
It’s not a mispronunciation or “laziness” or anything like that, just a feature of some English dialects. We make the same sort of distinction between “a” and “an” regarding following vowel sounds, and it seems to me to be for matters of euphony and elision. That one just happens to be codified orthographically and we have two distinct words. Sounds in English change all the time depending on preceding and following sounds. Take, for example, the letter “s”. As a plural marker, it is either pronounced /s/ or /z/ depending on whether the preceding letter is unvoiced or voiced, or if there is a preceding vowel sound. In the latter two cases, it’s pronounced /z/.
This is not to say this is a hard-and-fast “rule” in American English. It was taught as a rule for me at my schools growing up, but it seems to vary by dialect and speaker, and there are other reasons the “thee” pronunciation creeps up in spontaneous speech among native speakers that has nothing to do with what sound the following word starts with. But it’s a usual feature of many American dialects. I grew up with Sesame Street, and, just quickly Youtubing it, here is a clip featuring “the elephant dance.” In cases where “the” is followed by a word beginning with a vowel (“the annual elephant dance,” “the elephant stomp,”) Oscar pronounces it as “thee.”
All quite true, and I’ll add that I don’t think it’s even possible to pronounce /s/ after the voiced consonants in the same syllable, because of assimilation. You’d have to stop vibrating your vocal cords without a hiatus, which I don’t think is anatomically feasible.
I’m sure somebody who knows more about phonology than I will shortly be calling bullshit.
“bird” never had a “J” sound.
But that was in the time of Beowulf, and how was it pronounced?
Well, back in the days of Chaucer.
Fool of a Took!
I did not assert that “bird” ever had a [j] sound (that is, the sound beginning “yell”). The symbol you mistake for j was ɹ, the sound beginning “rain.” I transcribed it thus to distinguish it from [r] because i wished to make it clear that the rhotic I was talking about was the alveolar approximant, not the trill.. Most people wouldn’t bother, but I’m saditty.
I have dispatched a Linda-Park model throttlebot to take your apology and slap you silly.
Fricking hobbits, I don’t understand why we have to put up with them.
You sent the sexbot version instead, you want her back?
Yeah, I’m not sure it’s possible either. One of the consonants is going to have to bend, either the voiced consonant becoming unvoiced, or the “s” becoming a voiced “z” sound. That said, there’s no problem in a word like “pieces,” but the final “s” also gets voiced. This sort of voicing and devoicing happens in a number of languages. Slavic languages, for instance, devoice many normally voiced consonants, depending on their position in a word. For example, take the Polish town of “Kraków.” Normally, a “w” sound in Polish represents a [v] sound, but as a terminal consonant preceded by a vowel sound, it becomes an [f]. But in other contexts, like “w Karkowie” (“in Krakow”), it gets its normal voiced [v] pronunciation. So even in languages that are considered very phonetic (in respect to orthography), context and surrounding sounds often dictate how they are pronounced.
Thank you, Wendell Wagner! I was gritting my teeth reading the previously posted erroneous comments regarding Peking/Beijing. What westerners don’t realize is that if you know how to read Wade-Giles Romanization, you pronounce Peking as “Beijing.” And the j in Beijing is just like the j in just, or Joe, not the Frenchy *soup du jour *sound Americans give it.
I think maybe we use thee before a vowel so we don’t have to make a stop there. The phrases would come out almost as the yelephant stomp and the yannual elephant dance. If you pronounce the with the schwa sound you have to stop, or maybe call it the helephant stomp.
An extreme case of a word losing letters is the Latin month “Augustus” becoming the French “août”, pronounced /u/.