In many cases the final ‘e’ in words like ‘love’ is a vestige of a once-pronounced vowel. Old-English love was ‘lufu.’
I have no idea how you came to that conclusion.
Interesting list. Could you tell us WHICH 37 words end with v? Maybe we can find a pattern. (And just for trivia’ sake, which are the 17 that end with j and 6 for q?)
I’m dying to know a word with “qu” not followed by a vowel.
Assuming ‘…quy’ words aren’t good enough for you, you may be stuck with the plural of a Middle Eastern coin (or an alternate spelling of the singular):
There’s also qubit, as in quantum bit, but that might be too jargon-y.
My /usr/share/dict/words has 50 words which end in a v:
(Yes, it considers just v to be a word.)
It has only two which end in j:
And five that end in q:
Here we see a potential pitfall of working with regular expressions. I’ll show the command and the results, and then discuss what happened:
% egrep 'qu[^aeiouy]' /usr/share/dict/words
Urquhart
appliqué
appliqué's
appliquéd
appliquéing
appliqués
manqué
risqué
The command is the line at the top, after the % sign. The result is everything below that.
What happened is that the pattern I used to mean ‘not a vowel’ actually meant ‘is any character other than a, e, i, o, u, or y’, and é qualifies. If you’re not careful with your code, you can get all kinds of interesting results.
(Oh, and if I mistakenly leave the y out of the pattern, the result includes colloquy, obloquy, obsequy, soliloquy, and their possessive forms. Another little subtlety.)
Because when we say
we imply that the letter determines the pronunciation, (and that in this case, the letter “makes” a different sound). But it’s not that the F is pronounced “differently”; it’s that the /v/ normally isn’t represented by F.
I think this helps define the problem. However they got that way there are plenty of words that end with ‘v’ sound. Spelling and pronunciation are only loosely coupled. Some of the explanation for this is in the evolution of word pronunciations and some in the evolution of spelling.
Hm, every one on your list except rev is a proper name. I’m surprised yours doesn’t have “shiv” at least. Here are the 37 in my file.
accumulativ
ahartalav
akov
ameliorativ
analav
appreciativ
dev
div
emanativ
Grundlov
Harv
kalashnikov
Kislev
legislativ
leitmotiv
lev
Liv
Mev
Mordv
Pshav
Rajeev
Rajiv
rev
Rotanev
Sanjeev
Sclav
shiv
skiv
Slav
sov
spiv
struv
tav
thruv
v
Vladislav
Yugoslav
I’d like to mention, in case anyone noticed that the numbers in my first post don’t add up, my list was actually taken from a 235,860 word file on a Macintosh. Looking at the larger file on Linux, it has 142 words that end in v after filtering out proper names, although clearly many of these don’t even remotely qualify as “English words”.
Nice find. On the contrary, I think this is a fine new upstanding member of the English language and its standard orthography, with impeccable birth credentials from that community.
Not saying that “Haj” and “Qatar” are not members (for now) of that collection, but they are of more recent wanderers-in to our melting pot language, whose determinations of correct transliteration can change; perhaps they will stay, and join “risqué” and its brethren who since the very roots [heh] of historical English have set up camp.
Rather than “jargon” in this discussion I would suggest special pleading for words with letter names. Here “qubit” to my eyes is far more elegant than “qbit” (or “Qbit” or “Q-bit”) or “Y-connector.”
Yeah, I’m surprised at that as well.
(Brief session with package manager later.)
OK, the package called ‘wamerican-insane’ is apparently what you have on your Linux system, and what I didn’t have until quite recently, and that includes such probably-spurious entries as ‘electromotiv’; it even mentions in the description that it possibly contains invalid words.
It also contains ‘shiv’, of course.
This is semantic quibbling. I knew what I meant; you knew what I meant; virtually all readers knew what I meant. Communication was achieved. Your pedantry serves no purpose.
For the Word Ways articles, here’s the article on Q with no U (you have to hit the “Download” button to get it): Must You Join the Queue. I’ve seen two addition in the years since this was published: shequel, a variant spelling of shekel, and qubit, as noted above, for words with qu not followed by a vowel.
For my article on J-ending words: End of the Word: J. Note that my list includes capitalized words, but not personal or place names. I’ve seen a few others since that was published, but the only ones that comes to mind are ganj and Zanj.
Years ago I was analyzing English text to get ideas for data compression methods and I noticed this “-v” peculiarity. Not having a large online dictionary at the time, the only words I could think of were “shiv”, “leitmotiv” and the “*slav” words. Good to see that I apparently didn’t miss anything of note.
Yet another thing that contributes (indirectly) to the fine analysis by Shannon on the entropy of English.
Looking over markn+'s list with proper names excluded actually has several. E.g., “kolmogorov”* is a proper name and I don’t think it’s become genericized to any extent. Apparently though “markov” got left out and that’s probably gets more usage as a generic term. I don’t see “khrushchev” going the way of “lynch” and such.
- I guess I’m just primed here to mention Information Theory people.
Of course, “z” is relatively uncommon anywhere in a word, and “j” isn’t too far behind, so it’s not all that surprising that they’d be low in the final-letter rankings. A more interesting measure would be a letter’s end-word frequency divided by its overall frequency.
“q” is still a special case, of course, but for purposes of English orthography, it’s probably best to consider “qu” to be a single letter.
I just want to know why teachers for years told me this was an English rule. ‘I’ comes before ‘e’ except after ‘c’
weight <…wait wat? I just think English is a bit overly complicated, certainly more than it needs to be. Then again I have forgotten a lot of what I learned in school
I just noticed I misspelled that. It should be sheqel. It’s in M-W Collegiate, which means it’s a fairly common word.
Interesting thought. Ok, in this table, columns 2 and 3 are the total count and frequency of each letter anywhere in a word, columns 4 and 5 are the count and frequency of the letter when it is the final letter in a word, and the last column is column 4 (count as final letter) divided by column 2 (count anywhere in word). By this metric, final V drops to second to last, although it’s nearly tied with final Q for last.
y 51681 2.29% 27747 11.76% = 53.689%
d 68191 3.02% 15989 6.78% = 23.447%
e 235331 10.43% 44195 18.74% = 18.780%
s 139542 6.18% 26060 11.05% = 18.675%
k 16158 0.72% 2646 1.12% = 16.376%
g 47094 2.09% 6432 2.73% = 13.658%
n 158743 7.03% 19962 8.46% = 12.575%
m 70680 3.13% 8862 3.76% = 12.538%
x 6932 0.31% 794 0.34% = 11.454%
l 130463 5.78% 14927 6.33% = 11.442%
c 103440 4.58% 11324 4.80% = 10.947%
t 152831 6.77% 14823 6.28% = 9.699%
r 160985 7.13% 15463 6.56% = 9.605%
h 64356 2.85% 4754 2.02% = 7.387%
a 199554 8.84% 12595 5.34% = 6.312%
w 13864 0.61% 703 0.30% = 5.071%
f 24165 1.07% 919 0.39% = 3.803%
p 78163 3.46% 2199 0.93% = 2.813%
z 8460 0.37% 144 0.06% = 1.702%
o 170692 7.56% 2300 0.98% = 1.347%
b 40433 1.79% 477 0.20% = 1.180%
i 201032 8.91% 1984 0.84% = 0.987%
u 87353 3.87% 524 0.22% = 0.600%
j 3167 0.14% 18 0.01% = 0.568%
v 20177 0.89% 38 0.02% = 0.188%
q 3734 0.17% 7 0.00% = 0.187%
Same with “v”, the 6th least common letter in English.
One reason for that is that that file was based on Wester’s Second Unabridged. That dictionary has a large number of reformed spellings that never caught on. Many of them are words with final silent Es with the E dropped, which results in many more entries ending in V.