Why Do People Rhyme Rain With Again?
By Anatoly Liberman
This is a story of again; proceeds will be added as an reconsideration. Throughout the commencement one-half of the twentieth century, dictionaries informed their users that again is pronounced with a diphthong, that is, with the aforementioned vowel every bit in the name of the letter A. (I am adding this explanation, because native speakers of English with no noesis of phonetics seldom realize that the vowel in 24-hour interval, have, main consists of two parts: the nucleus and a glide; the formulation that, for example, a in bait is the "long counterpart of short a" in bat makes matters even worse.) Some people notwithstanding rhyme again with fain, feign, fane. However, most rhyme it with Ben, den, ten; all the recent British and American dictionaries hold on this point.
The history of the adverb again is surprisingly checkered. In Modern English, the use of the digraphs ai, ay, and ei for short e is, as undergraduate students like to put it, non "very unique": compare due southaid, saysouth, and heifer. But that does not make the puzzle easier, because says and said stand out every bit abnormal even in English, in which one can sometimes feel uncertain of how to spell the shortest words. Clearly, the spelling, irrational from today's point of view, goes dorsum to the pronunciation of onetime, simply tracing the fortunes of each freak is no easy affair. This holds especially for heifer, but again too poses many difficulties.
But the origin of again is clear. Amidst its cognates nosotros find High german entgegen "opposite" and Sometime Icelandic í gegn "against." In the English word, the prefix a- goes dorsum to the preposition on. One-time Engl. ongean meant "in the opposite direction" and "back," not "in one case more than." The oldest sense of –gain has been preserved in gainsay, literally "speak against." The Germanic root of –gean and –gegn must have been gag-; its meaning demand not occupy our attention, The vowel ea in ongean was long, which means that it consisted of two halves, each of which could be stressed, depending on the word'southward place in the judgement, intonation, and accent. There was a time when in words of such structure stress shifted from east to a, though it is not clear whether the attested modern dialectal grade agan owes its vowel to eá, from éa.
Equally far back every bit in Onetime English, the letter given here as g in ongean designated the sound we now hear in y es, y ou, and y onder. The interplay of g and y is common in the West Germanic languages. Those who take been exposed to the Berlin dialect know that, for instance, G ekend "expanse" sounds like y eyfinish there. In Middle German language, legt "lays" and träthousandt "carries" were spelled leit and treit. Old Engl. thou- also changed to y- before i- and e-, and the modern forms y ield and y earn acquit witness to that change (their German cognates begin with 1000-: thou elten and begehren). At that place would take been many more than English words like those two but for the Viking raids. In the language of the Scandinavians, g remained "hard," and that is why Modern Engl. get has non merged in pronunciation with nonetheless. Also, requite is a phonetic borrowing from the northward, whether straight from the invading Danes or from the northern English dialects in which k- withstood "softening" to y-.
In Heart English, the most common form of again was ayen, withal with a long vowel. To an unschooled observer the phonetic history of every well-documented language looks like an endless exercise in futility, a conspiracy invented for obfuscating commencement students. Long vowels get brusk and some time later undergo secondary lengthening, only to lose the difficult-gained length a century or two subsequently. Monophthongs turn into diphthongs, while diphthongs go monophthongs and occupy the slots vacated past their former neighbors. Wouldn't information technology have been more than natural for them to stay put and avoid playing lobster quadrille? Language is a self-regulating machinery, and many changes only wait erratic, but others are accounted for by the fact that sounds, like people, succumb to contradictory rules: from i point of view it may be expedient for a vowel to lengthen, but from another it would be improve if it remained short or became long and then returned to its initial state. Phonetic system is like a modern democracy, which faces chaos and in trying to overcome information technology produces fifty-fifty greater chaos. There is no end to this process. In the history of once more nosotros discover how the original diphthong became a long monophthong, shortened, lengthened, and diphthongized. The coexistence of 2 modernistic pronunciations of again reflects those changes. Says and said exhibit partly the aforementioned motion-picture show, simply only the curt variants take survived.
Somewhat unexpectedly, over again is not pronounced ayen. In the fourteenth century, the Kentish English for "pricks (or rather "bite") of conscience" was ayenbite of inwyt, as we know from the title of moralizing prose written in 1340 (compare backbiting). Ayen-bite is a morpheme past morpheme translation of Old French re-mors "remorse," literally "biting with ever-increasing 'mordancy'." But past the seventeenth century the forms with ag- superseded those with ay-. As usual in such cases, suspicion falls on northern English or Scandinavian speakers. The reason why in this give-and-take the southern and central consonant gave way to northern g– has never been explained.
Confronting surfaced as an adverb: Heart Engl. ageines is agein followed by an adverbial suffix. Its concluding -t is, to utilize a scholarly term, excrescent. This "parasitic" sound has besides made its way later on due south into amidst , whilst , amongst , and a few others. A well-known vulgarism is acrossed. A similar change affected Onetime Engl. betweohs ~ betwyx ~ betwux: betwix became betwixt(eastward), and the idiom betwixt and betwixt is still live.
In distinction from once more, gain (noun and verb) has an hands recoverable past. It is a borrowing of Quondam French gain (masculine; feminine gagne); the verb was gaigner (Modern French gagner). But the ancient word came to Romance from the Germanic verb for "chase" and acquired the senses "cultivate land" and "earn." It follows that gain in gainsay, in which again appears without its old prefix, and gain, as in gainful occupation, are singled-out words, and simply chance turned them into homophones and allowed them to meet in Modern English. Such is the story of gain1 and gain2 . Information technology is more complicated than what 1 could expect from a blog posted in belatedly Dec, simply cypher venture, nothing win, every bit the British say, or nothing ventured, nothing gained, as they say in America.
Anatoly Liberman is the author of Give-and-take Origins…And How Nosotros Know Them too every bit An Analytic Dictionary of English Etymology: An Introduction. His column on word origins, The Oxford Etymologist, appears here, each Wednesday. Ship your etymology question to him care of weblog@oup.com; he'll practice his best to avert responding with "origin unknown."
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Epitome credit: King David does repentance via wikipaintings.org.
Source: https://blog.oup.com/2012/12/why-dont-gain-and-again-rhyme/
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