Let's see if our friends from The Sentinel can give us any help. The English language mostly derives from the language of the Angles, who invaded Britain after the Romans left, so it's basically a Germanic language, albeit with French Romance additions courtesy of the Norman Conquest some four hundred years later, in Originally the k was pronounced - it's a voiceless plosive, made by blocking the flow of air with the back of the tongue and then releasing it.
The n sound is make by putting the tip of the tongue behind the upper teeth. The combination means the tongue is pretty busy if you say k-nife or k-night, and it's easier to drop the k sound. In English, the k sound before an n was dropped in the s although the k-n sound survives in languages like German or Dutch.
However, by the s, printing had been developed, and spelling had, to some extent, been standardized; the spelling of words that start kn or gn, with its silent g still hasn't caught up with the pronunciation. Although if it ever did, it would add some more words to the list of those that already have more than one meaning, e.
Reaching for a sheet of paper he wrote a few words, then handed it to his friend. He nawed his nuckles in frustration. Nobody really k-nows why or when it became silent but this change is believed to have transpired sometime around the 16th to 17th centuries.
For some reason the 'kn' consonant cluster became hard for English speakers to pronounce. Perhaps it's the result of foreign influences; after all, England began colonizing the world at a large scale around this time. This phenomena is just one of those mysteries of English language development -- along with the Great Vowel Shift. Sorry, Ailian. I didn't refresh. You're theory makes a lot of sense. One only needs to look at the popularity of Estuary English to see how pronunciation patterns change for no apparent reason.
I wouldn't say that Estuary English is a change of English for no reason. From what I've read, it has to do with gaining "street credibility," and the dialect owes much of its influence to the London Jamaican dialect.
It also has something to do with less status consciousness and the accepting of some of the traditional patterns of speech that have always existed in East London by the middle class, but not all of those patterns. We could get rid of ''kn'' and ''gn'' and replace them simply with ''n'' but then how would we spell ''know''? If we dropped the ''k'' in ''know'' we'd get ''now'' which is already a word which is pronounced differently.
The reason that they have disappeared from spelling is most likely due to the fact that the sounds were gone by the time that spelling of those words previously having those sounds was standardized in Modern English. Personally, I like the current spellings as they let us know which is "know" and which is "now" and "knot" or "not" and so on. I've heard somewhere on the web that some Scots pronounce the ''kn'' in words like ''knight'', ''knock'', ''know'', ''knob'', ''knife'' etc. So, if we got rid of ''gn'' and ''kn'' and replaced them with ''n'' it would work for everyone except for those people that use the dental nasals.
For then ''kn'' and ''gn'' are diagraphs representing two phonemes different from [n]. In Chaucer's day, the 'e' was pronounced. So, in a word like 'bite' not a real old-English example, but simpler for exposition the 'e' at the end would have meant that the word was pronounced bi.
In the Germanic language, open syllables had long vowels, so 'bit' would be short 'i', 'bite' would be long. Nowadays, the distinction between long and short vowels in English is actually more than just length because of the Great Vowel Shift. So, whereas before, 'bite' would have been something like 'beetuh', the Great Vowel Shift and the eventual elision of the final 'e' makes its modern pronunciation 'byt' — silent 'e'.
Another process occurs when we borrow words from other languages. The initial consonant sounds in these words are not used in English, at least to start words. English ends words with those clusters, though: 'hats', 'chops'. The initial 'p' in 'psychology' and 'pterodactyl', and other words from Greek has become silent in English. Some English speakers — not all — simplify the word 'tsunami' by not pronouncing the initial 't', so that it fits in with the phonological rules of English.
Joe Devney, linguistic consultant.
0コメント