Comments by "EebstertheGreat" (@EebstertheGreat) on "RobWords"
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@macronencer I haven't really noticed that, but I might be so immersed in American dialects that I have just heard "forest" as two syllables even when it is said as one syllable. I can certainly imagine it being said like "forced," which I agree is one syllable. There also might be a continuum between the two- and one-syllable pronunciations, which pokes a hole in the idea that syllables are primary. Really, all American rhotacized Rs are subject to that complication.
To me, syllabification is very confused in words like "fire" and "hire." For instance, I consider "hire" to be one syllable (like most people, I think), but I pronounce it in precisely the same way as "higher." So either they should both be two syllables, or they should both be one, or perhaps both are one and a half. But I pronounce them exactly the same, so surely they can't have a different number of syllables. On the other hand, I clearly say "cure" as a single syllable word, not at all like the word "fewer." But some people do pronounce those alike (except for the leading consonant), so in those dialects, "cure" is really two syllables. Right? Or is it one syllable, and I say "higher" with one syllable? It's not totally clear.
Also, yes, "solder" is an extreme outlier of a word. The American pronunciation is highly irregular, like the pronunciation of "colonel" or "Wednesday." The British pronunciation is fully regular. I'm not sure how that happened. Something equally weird happened to "lieutenant," but then the Americans and Brits went in different weird directions, and then the Brits took a 180 and came back to the weird American way. Some words are just like that.
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"Whelm" does not mean "capsize" but rather "submerge" or "cover." So "overwhelm" isn't "overturn" but rather "cover over" (meaning the same thing as "whelm"). If a wave whelms or overwhelms a boat, that doesn't necessarily mean that it turns it over, just that it completely covers the deck. So the figurative sense of "whelm" (or "overwhelm") comes from the idea of something emotionally affecting you so greatly that you are completely engulfed by it. Similarly, an army can overwhelm its opponents' defenses like a wave overtopping a levee. It wouldn't make a lot of sense to "capsize" an opponent's defenses. "Underwhelm" doesn't have this connotation, because the original meaning of "whelm" is almost lost, and it is just the negative form of the figurative use of "overwhelm."
The word "flammable" is etymologically justifiable as meaning "capable of flaming," i.e. able to be on fire. Etymologically, "inflammable" means "capable of being set on fire." Clearly anything that can be on fire must be capable of being set on fire and vice-versa, so they effectively mean the same thing. But you could nitpick and say that kindling is more easily set on fire than a log, while both burn equally well once ignited, so perhaps there is some distinction (but not one realized in practice).
"Kempt" is just a normal (albeit not especially common) word. You mostly see it in the phrase "well-kempt." "Kempt" is clearly a past participle of something (kemban), but the finite form of the verb has been lost. The same thing happened with the word "wont," though the meaning shifted and no longer matches the grammatical form. That makes "unwonted" a double past participle, being formed as the past participle of a past participle.
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Your explanation for the use of K in Latin is wrong. It wasn't used before different vowels than C, but for a different sound. In early Latin, C was used for all /k/ and /g/ sounds and S was used for all /s/ sounds. Thus you have words like "cuius" and "calendae." Later, Q was used before U in some words like "qui," for reasons I haven't been able to track down. Note that in Greek, qoph was used interchangeably with kappa when it was used at all (which was rarely). K was used in a small handful of Greek loanwords, and there inconsistently, e.g. in "kalendae" sometimes, but not before certain vowels, just sort of at random. K didn't become common in Latin until the third or fourth century. The C sound had shifted by this point from /k/ to /s/, explaining why some words that had a kappa in Greek have an /s/ sound in English, like "Cyprus." But after this sound shift, Latin continued to borrow words from Greek, and these newer borrowings were spelled with a K to clarify the pronunciation. This explains why so many English words with a K that don't come from German derive from Greek. And for instance, compare Latin Hercules to Greek Herakles from which it derives.
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