Dr. Drake I was excited when you showed up on the Boards, and you’ve done nothing except to make me even happier. Glad to have a professional here to field these questions.
No, obviously the first person who says ‘morrow’ is really cool and everyone else is like, “wow, fonzie, you’re so sexy when you say morrow” and starts doing it too. Maybe to you they’d say to go to Scotland. You probably couldn’t coin ‘fo sho’ either, if you tried.
Webster’s dates “alright” back to 1887, so it’s not a recent development.
It probably helped that the expression often spelled “alright” doesn’t mean the same thing as the word “all” plus the word “right”. “Alright” is usually synonymous with “okay”, meaning either that something is acceptable or that the speaker is agreeing. “Alright” is not used to mean “everything is correct”, but “all right” can be used in that way. The “alright” spelling would remove ambiguity in a sentence like “Your answers on this test were all right.”
I blush. Of course, the last time “all right” vs. “alright” came up here, I made a complete ass of myself, so I can’t quite claim perfection yet.
In post #7 I wrote:
> Thus the phrase “on morgenne” meant what we mean by “in the morning” in
> modern English.
I meant:
> Thus the phrase “to morgenne” meant what we mean by “in the morning” in
> modern English.
Bearflag70 writes:
> Obviously I see how one word can change meanings over time and I can see
> how two words can become one word, and how one word might get split into
> two, I suppose, but I’m trying to understand how one word morphs into quite a
> different word with the same definition.
I’m baffled as to why you have no problem with semantic change (i.e., change in a word’s meaning) but don’t see how phonological change (i.e., change in the pronunciation of a word) could occur. Here’s the Wikipedia entry on phonological change:
Phonological change is actually easier to track than semantic change, since phonological changes generally occur over many words while semantic changes often occur in a single word. Note that linguists know a lot about the tendencies of phonological change. Having observed the direction of change in many languages, they know what sounds tend to change into other sounds over time.
I guess because I can cite examples of words that have changed meanings or seem to be in the process of semantic change in recent times: gay; literally; decimate
I can’t think of any commonly used words that have changed pronunciation and spelling recently. Maybe “thru” will catch on???
I’m surprised a popular spelling of “tonight” from the 1920s to the 1940s – “to-nite” – never gained traction and had its hyphen removed.
For fuck’s sake the meaning of ‘literally’ has not changed! It is being used as hyperbole.
Spelling doesn’t change because it’s set in perscriptionist stone. Pronounciation changes all the time, but only in the circles of slang. Official pronounciation has likewise been set in stone since the early days of tv/radio. But back in the illiterate non-tv-watching past, pronounciation could change much more reasily.
If mouse-over dictionaries ever become popular, meaning will also freeze. For now, though, it’s still easy to wing.
Christ, we’re just discussing language here. Everyone has some hot buttons I guess.
Pronunciation is indeed changing all the time. It happens rather slowly certainly. You don’t notice it as much for several reasons. One is that you are only (of course) listening to current accents in your conversations. To get an idea of how much it’s changed, listen to the accents in movies of the early 1930’s. The differences aren’t just because they spoke in a more formal way. There really are differences in their accents from current accents. Another reason is that you read older books and assume that if the authors read them aloud they would use your accent. But that’s not at all true. Shakespeare’s plays, for instance, would be considerably harder to understand if spoken in the accent in which he spoke, which doesn’t sound like any current accent. Furthermore, you are all the time hearing different accents whenever you listen to someone speaking who is from a different region. The region in which the accents are spoken are always slowly changing, as features from one accent slowly spreads to other regions. Indeed, your own accent has probably changed over your lifetime. Sound recording has now existed long enough that we can track the slow changes in the accents of some people.
Decimate to mean “destroy every tenth man” has only been used in its literal Latin sense for historical purposes. This original meaning is reserved for the past–it has never had common use in contemporary English language contexts.
The extended emphatic sense is shown from 1663, hardly recent, and it is the only thriving definition of the word for contemporary meanings.
Oh, I forgot in my last post that I was going to give an example of a phonological change that’s currently going on in some regions of the U.S.:
This started in upstate New York and has gradually expanded over the past century and a half to a larger portion of the U.S. This is typical of phonological changes, I think, in that they start in a limited area and slowly spread.
The trouble is, it’s difficult to hear both sides of a sound shift. One of them will sound like an accent to you, and thus “wrong” and something you can easily discount. The other will be “normal.” Only in hindsight can you say, “yep, shoulda seen that comin’.” [-ng > -n]. Personally, I say “melk” and “vanella,” but since I learned to spell in an institutional setting, those look wrong, while short-i “milk” and “vanilla” sound wrong, even though other people and their dictionaries will insist that they’re correct. You might say, “Would like some milk?” and I’d respond, “I’d love some melk,” but neither of us could say “Would you like whole melk or skim milk?”
With semantic shift, on the other hand, you might easily hold multiple meanings of a word in your head. “The gay couple was having a gay time at the ice-cream social, but their kids thought it was gay.” No one would ever say that sentence, because the second “gay” is obsolete (and the third is offensive), but it’s easy for an English speaker to see and understand all three meanings at once.
Spelling changes very slowly, so most of our words reflect centuries-old pronunciations (almost no one says “water” with both [t] and [r]*). There are a few changes coming in. “Thru” instead of “through” gives me the screaming horrors, but it’s just the completion of a centuries-long process of losing that final guttural. We no longer say -gh; why write the obsolete letters, just for historical funsies? [Yes!]
- Most British people drop the [r] and rhotacise the vowel. Most Americans change intervocalic -t- to an alveolar flap (something like a D and something like an R).
It’s funny and quite appropriate to this thread that you contrast “All right” meaning “everything is correct”, with “alright” meaning “okay”, since the origin of the word “okay” is from a shortened misspelling of the phrase “All correct”