The Lemon Fool

Interesting article about the history of the subject:

https://www.etymonline.com/columns/post/etymology-and-spelling

Misspelling , mispronunciation and redefining meanings are responsible for the modern vernacular moving away from English , so that the inaccurate is accepted as correct.

3 examples;-

1. Henge. Now pronounced with a hard "g" ( as in germ ) to refer to a stone circle,its original pronunciation was with a soft "g" ( as in garment ; garden ) , was Old Englisn for "hang" from the original comment that it appeared that the stones hang from the sky. The wrong meaning is now universal.


2. Ski. Originally a Scandinavian onomatopeia ( schee ) to represent the sound that blades make travelling across snow now refers to the blades themselves.

3. William Rufus. A corruption of his French epithet " Guillaume Rugueux " ( William the Rough/Coarse )


Finally ,mention the Black Box and everyone knows to what you refer.

marronier wrote:1. Henge. Now pronounced with a hard "g" ( as in germ ) to refer to a stone circle,its original pronunciation was with a soft "g" ( as in garment ; garden ).

Did you perchance get that hard/soft stuff upside down? And isn't the softness of the g in henge simply a forced result of the e that follows it?

Remind me to bore you sometime with the story of the second sound shift, which meant that everywhere from central Germany downward shifted all the vowels and a whole lot of consonants, but left the proto-English and the proto-Dutch (such as they were) speaking the old language in the way that everybody else used to, whereas the proto-Germans themselves had moved on to a totally new pronunciation. And to this day, nobody really knows why they did it, unless it was something to do with trade. It must have sounded as if everybody had adopted the German equivalent of estuary English, or maybe Geordie.

My old linguistics lecturer could go on and on about how cow and beef are derived from the same root word and have simply evolved differently. But forgetfulness has been kind, so I'll spare you that one.

BJ

I never wot dun studied linguisticals ...

But I do speak Swedish, and indeed learned to ski as a child in Sweden. I may not remember much from all that time back, but I do remember they spell "ski" the same way we do. The pronunciation is different, but that's generic: it applies equally to other "sk" words. I also remember that the word applies to the blades (skidor - the second part indicates the plurality of a pair of them in a language where the definite article takes the form of a suffix to the noun). Just another word that has usages both as noun and verb.