Was it originally "ask" or "aks"?

Factual Questions
1

Posted in GQ because I am hoping for an actual cite:

The word ‘ask’, to me, has always been pronounced ‘ask’. It was the urban subculture that has popularized the blatant mispronunciation to ‘aks’.

However, when debating this with my coworkers today, a few swore up and down that originally (they claim hundreds of years ago) the word was pronounced ‘aks’, and it is only in more recent times that we have said ‘ask’.

This makes absolutely no sense to me, and I demanded a cite. They couldn’t come up with one, but then again I couldn’t find one that proved my point. So dopers, give me a hand. What’s the original pronunciation, and can you prove it?

2

When wanting to know older forms of a word (its etymology), there is this wonderful compendium of information about words. It’s called a dictionary. :wink:

Merriam-Webster Online: Ask

3

I don’t think this one is that clear-cut.

OED

.

Work your way through that, and tell me that it was always “ask.”

4

I’m not certain if ‘ask’ or ‘aks’ came first, but the ‘aks’ pronunciation can easily explained as a simplification of a difficult consonant cluster through metathesis. That is to say, the ‘ks’ consonant cluster is difficult to pronounce (most languages find this one hard) and in order to make it easier the two sounds are transposed (technical term: metathesis*).

Sound changes to make pronunciation easier are pretty common in every language. ‘Aks’ just happens to not be the Standard English pronunciation of today, though it might have been in the past.

*The stress is on the second syllable, i.e. metathesis, in case you were wondering.

5

Both verbs, acsian and ascian, are attested in Old English, and it’s not clear which form is historically primary. As sjc said, the change, in either direction, is pretty easy to motivate. Modern “aks” pronunciations have historical precedent, but they are innovations rather than direct continuations.

6

The really really earliest form has s first, with the k originating as a suffix:

Old English āscian, ācsian to ask, seek, from Germanic *aiskōn from Proto-Indo-European *ais-sk, suffixed form of *ais- to wish, desire.

Well, I hope that settles it.

7

Neat, that means ask shares a root with the Norwegian for wish (both verb and noun), only we’ve snuck an ‘n’ in there: ønske.

8

Well, given that throughout that entire time period, there were those using the form asc- or ask- (or other similar derivatives, such as esche-), and given that the only thing we know is that some others spelled it axe-, this tells us nothing about its pronounciation. It is quite possible it was spelled axe- and pronounced ask-.

Perhaps the axe- was used much the same way it is currently, that is as a form limited to certain areas and or social status?

And you will note you are using the type of resource I suggested to the OP. :smiley:

9

The two earliest forms given in the OED cite were c1000 “Ic ahsie” and a1038 “á ácsode”, so the oldest known Old English forms were definitely close to /aks/ than to /ask/.

10

The word “ask” is also prounounced “aks” in theGullah language.

It’s very possible, and I’m not a linguist so I can only speculate, that among the speakers of English, at least in the U.S. there may have been two divergent evolutions of language lending to the “aks” pronunciation.

11

This might be completely irrelevant to the OP but in John McCormack’s 1930 recording of “The Garden Where the Praties Grow” he uses the pronunciation “aks”.
You can hear it here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L6kDqE_YhQs&mode=related&search=

12

I think you mean it the other way around- the ‘sk’ conconant cluster is difficult to pronounce. That’s why ‘ask’ is mispronounced as ‘aks’, because ‘ask’ is (supposedly) too difficult. Although, I think the middle aged women I work with from Staten Island pronounce it that way just because they’re lazy and ignorant.

13

It doesn’t directly address the question, but “run” has an interesting history with metathesis followed by a reversing metathesis. In proto-Germanic the form was rVn (*rinnan or something similar), in Old English it was Vrn (eornan or something similar) and in Modern English back to rVn (run). Metathesis is common in English (and Frisian), especially in words with r near the beginning. That’s why we have “horse” instead of “hross,” for example.

14

In what way is it lazy? Honestly? Because in all my life, being used to the pronunciation “ask”, I have never, in a tired moment of exhaustion, come anywhere near to saying “aks”… because that’s not what I’m used to.

For the most part, people pronounce words the way they do because that’s what they’re used to; it’s what they grew up hearing around them. When those pronunciations differ from others, it’s not laziness, it’s just being used to different things.

15

Dialects are not considered mispronunciations or even non-standard. Different dialects have a higher status at some times than at others. In Revolutionary times, Boston accents were looked upon with more favor than in the 1960s when President Kennedy’s pronunciation of Cuba sounded a little strange to the rest of the country.

The general dialect of “yeuman beings” from NYC has always been popular, but now the Mid-Western and Western dialects are as popular because of broadcast schools and the entertainment industry.

But the dialects of people who live in other parts of the country are just as valid even though they don’t have the status with the general population (which is an opinion ) of other dialects.

Warning: Don’t go to Pennsylvania and tell people that they are saying things wrong! You can’t move a mile without changing dialects there!

Dialects of English

If you scroll to the lower portion of this cite, you will find some interesting observations on American dialects and a map of dialects in the USA. There are also observations of English dialects in other countries too. Fascinating cite if you are interested in such things.

16

In the way that they can’t be bothered to make the effort to pronounce it correctly. That doesn’t mean that when you’re exhausted you begin to mispronounce words that are hard to say.

17

“Lazy” and “Ignorant” are the standard insults to throw at people who use non-standard pronunciation. But why should they be bothered to throw off the way of speaking they were raised with for the standard pronunciation? Honest question.

Most people end up conforming for socio-economic reasons. The mainstream herd has incorrect ideas about how languages work and the relationship of someone’s speech patterns to their worth as a person, so you either learn to talk like the rest of the country or you get discriminated against. Ask a Southerner. (I actually speak pretty standard American English myself, but I find the impenetrable ignorance surrounding dialects astounding.)

18

I like how you’ve said this. It provokes the side question of how do people outside a region (and I speak as a Southerner) learn to dismiss the “ignorant and backward” types in that region? If there’s a better reason than the way these people are portrayed in movies, on TV and such, I’d like to know what it is. I propose that there are ignorant, backward, unlettered and such types in every region in the country. And I likewise propose that each region has its opposites to those characteristics. But if you’ve never done any traveling and interacting outside your own area, how can you judge the people in other areas? By buying into the stereotypes in the media. That’s some of the ignorance that this Message Board might be trying to fight. And it really gets old to be branded as ignorant simply because of the region of the country where you live. That is Capital I Ignorance.

19

It also shares one with Icelandic, and the original root is more than likely Old Norse. (If you look at Old English writings-- for example, Beowulf, it looks an awful lot like Old Norse, IMO.) The Icelandic word for “wish” is osk, which is only slightly different than the Norwegian word. :smiley:

20

Yeah, and “ignorant” is a particularly silly one in this context; those middle-aged Staten Island women that McNew works with, what does he think their pronunciation shows them to be ignorant of? Surely he doesn’t believe the preposterous notion that they are ignorant of the standard pronunciation of “ask”, ignorant of the fact that their own pronunciation differs from it, so that if one were to use the standard pronunciation in their presence, they would mutter “Huh? What are you talking about?”.

At best, he can hold that their pronunciation may be evidence that they have not had extensive formal education, as there may well be correlation between such education and use of the standard pronunciation. But this would not be evidence for an assertion that use of the non-standard pronunciation is truly borne of, caused by, and/or substantively engaging in ignorance; it would just be another example of “People who hang out together say things similarly, in their own arbitrary way, while people who don’t hang out together don’t as much, having more differing arbitrary ways of speaking”. Objecting to the non-standard pronunciation would still be nothing more than futilely, arrogantly objecting to the idea that anyone should speak in a different manner from oneself.