I suppose people use loose for lose because they are unaware of the separate meaning and lose can have a long middle vowel, so we might end up with one word spelling: loose, meaning: lose. lose the hounds vs loose the hounds (a potentially fatal error), but if a word like loose is used infrequently enough, it may simply die out, even if the spelling lives on. It'll be interesting to see what happens - if spelling is the same or confused for long enough I suspect the pronunciation will also merge, and then we'll have the difficulty of confused meanings - e.g. Bertie Wooster was apparently using a construction that dated back a thousand years.) Wodehouse's characters greeting each other with a "what, what, what, old thing!". This gives a wonderful historical context to P.G. (Aside: I've read that the "what!" at the start of the poem was a use of the word as something similar to "ah!" or "lo!" or some other relatively meaningless poetical interjection. (Some friends from "posh" parts of Edinburgh definitely pronounce it, and also say something like "Wed'n'sday" pronouncing the "d".) I can say, though, that it's generally regarded as "better" to pronounce the "h" by a lot of English people, and it's also strongly pronounced in certain Scottish accents. I guess the question is still open as to whether the people who pronounce the "h" today are continuing an unbroken tradition that goes back to the Anglo-Saxons (and the majority who don't are using a simplified form), or whether the "h" dropped out of use sometime after the spelling was fixed, and modern speakers are re-introducing it. Actually, perhaps even more like "f-wot".
Certainly, when people pronounce the "h" it it's more like "h-wot" than "w-hot". I don't know when or why the "h" and the "w" got swapped around, though. "Hwaet" is the word that became "what" in modern English, and was (given that when the poem was written people tended to spell relatively phonetically) presumably pronounced. For example, the first line of the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf is "Hwaet! We Gardena in geardagum". The original form for at least some of those words is to start with "hw".
How do you feel about Jamaican english (which is, in its vernacular, not mutually intelligible with the three I just mentioned)? Vocabulary differences ("a tin of tuna" for "a can of tuna") and meaning differences (like the story where British politicians wanted a motion tabled immediately, because it was important, but American ones felt strongly that it shouldn't be tabled at all, because it was important) happen too.Īustralian, British, and American english are nevertheless fairly close. These obviously exist, but they're often so regular that they don't present much of an obstacle to communication. > such differences are primarily differences in accent One famous difference is that in Australian english, the words can ("a can of tuna") and can ("I can do that") don't rhyme (I believe "can" is actually the wrong word in AE for "a can of tuna", but the example is just there to illustrate the word's meaning). There's always more out there than we're aware of.
> Rhotic versus non-rhotic is the only real big difference I'm aware of Turns out, horse was also in this group but after a sound change its vowel shortened, hence the -s plural now. * According to OED the reason that some animal names have the same singular and plural was that they originally contained a long vowel, e.g. * Somewhat related to the last category: Have you ever wondered why the initial sound in chair and chandelier are pronounced differently in English? There was a sound change in French, chair was borrowed before that change and chandelier, like many other French word that start with ch, after that change. * I used to think that baby was the actual word and babe was a corruption, turns out most probably it was just the reverse (baby < babe + y) (. * In the "words that begin with an n" category he didn't include the most famous example: orange, the fruit, which has an n in Persian and Arabic from which it was borrowed but lost it ( (fruit)#Etymology) Very interesting article with cool examples.
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