Language Expert Answers English Questions

WIRED

University of Cambridge Research Fellow Dr. Stephen Turton joins WIRED to answer the internet's burning questions about the logic (and many quirks) of the English language. Why are so many English words not pronounced the way they're spelled? Why is the plural of 'child' not 'childs' but 'children?' 'Foot' becomes 'feet' but 'boot' does't pluralize to 'beet?' How do we know what Old English sounded like? Why is the letter R pronounced so different across languages? What does a pineapple have to do with either pines OR apples? Answers to these questions and many more await on Etymology Support.  Director: Lauren Zeitoun Director of Photography: Davide Bianco Editor: Alex Mechanik Expert: Stephen Turton Line Producer: Jamie Rasmussen Associate Producer: Paul Gulyas Production Manager: Peter Brunette Production Coordinator: Rhyan Lark Supervising Casting Producer: Thomas Giglio Camera Operator: Ashley Raim Gaffer: Jake Newell Sound Mixer: Mark Hennessey Production Assistant: Grace OConnor Post Production Supervisor: Christian Olguin Supervising Editor: Eduardo Araujo Additional Editor: Sam DiVito Assistant Editor: Justin Symonds

Transcript

00:00Hi, I'm Stephen Turton and this is Etymology Support.

00:08First question. Samuel M80056720 asks,

00:13I have a semi-serious question for etymologists. If feet is the plural for foot,

00:19why is beat not the plural of boot? Is it because of the vegetable?

00:24Foot belongs to a category of words that derive from Old English in which to make the plural

00:28you change the vowel in the word. So other words in this category are tooth, teeth,

00:32and goose, keys, mouse, mice. Book also used to be in this category in Old English but

00:37later on we regularized the spelling so it's book, books. If we kept the Old English pattern it would

00:42now be one book, two beach. The word boot on the other hand is not from Old English,

00:46it was borrowed from French into Middle English which is why it just gets the default plural s.

00:51There are lots of different ways of pluralizing nouns in Old English so you might form the plural

00:55by changing the vowel in the base word or you might form the plural by adding a suffix which

01:00could be as, a, an, oo, ru. In the Middle English period most of these ways of forming the plural

01:07fell out of use and the s plural came to predominate so it basically replaced the old plurals for a lot

01:13of English words just because it was easier. Charfaux asks, Weird etymology question,

01:18When and why did whoops slash oops become the default sound made when making a mistake?

01:24So whoops is actually more recent than you might think. The earliest evidence we have of whoops

01:28being used in writing dates to the 19th century. It actually seems to have been derived from oopsadaisy

01:34which we have slightly earlier evidence for. Oopsadaisy might have been a kind of whimsical

01:39alteration of lackadaisy which is in turn a whimsical alteration of alackaday which is in turn a whimsical

01:45alteration of alackaday which is a very old way of saying oh no. This is from the findingfensgold

01:51subreddit. Origin of the word clue. Clue originally meant a ball of thread. Then during Middle English

01:57it came to be associated with the Greek myth of Theseus who used a ball of thread to find his way

02:02in and out of the Minotaur's labyrinth by unspooling it on the way in and then following it back out.

02:08From this a clue came to mean something that helped lead you to a solution to a problem and that is now the

02:14only meaning which is common in English today. Ronald BBK asks, silent letters in words don't

02:19make any sense. How about you just don't add the letter in the word? So there are a couple of reasons

02:23that silent letters exist in English. One is that the pronunciation of the language has changed and the

02:29spelling system just hasn't kept up with it. For example the GH in words like through and thought

02:34and night. The GH exists there because that sound used to be pronounced. In Old English and Middle English

02:40that was the velificative . Eventually, because that's quite a difficult sound to pronounce,

02:44it dropped out of the language but we continue to spell words with a GH through a process of sheer

02:50inertia. There have been calls for spelling reform in English for literally centuries. In the 19th

02:55century one author complained that the word fish might as well be spelled G-H-O-T-I. GH as in the F at the end of

03:03rough, O as in the I in women and TI as in the SH in mention. Now in reality no one would actually

03:11spell fish this way because we know that there are implicit rules to where letter combinations can go

03:16in words. So we know that GH can stand for the sound but only at the end of a word, as in rough,

03:23enough, tough. There was also a moment in time where a word like mention would have been pronounced

03:28or something like that, but the T-I-O-N in English, if you say it enough times over and over

03:37it just becomes a lot easier to say , so T-I becomes . Ease of articulation is a common

03:43trigger for sound change in English and other languages. Krauser asks, why do question words

03:48, all start with . So this goes all the way back to the

03:55Indo-European, which is the earliest ancestor of the English language and many other European

04:00and Asian languages that etymologists have been able to reconstruct. Proto-Indo-European had an

04:07interrogative stem, an element of a word that would go into building other words that looked

04:12something like qui, and this and its variants were used to coin question words. And this qui

04:17survives into many modern languages, so for example in French and Spanish as QU, as in qui,

04:23QU, QUANDO, QUEL, it also survives in English as WH. And the resemblance is easy to see once you know

04:30that the original spelling and pronunciation in English was HW. Nobody ever actually said WHA.

04:37If you listen to older speakers today who still pronounce the H in these question words,

04:40you will hear that they put the H before the W. So it's what, why, when.

04:46At JPK underscore Murphy asks, wonder where the word salary originated?

04:50So the word salary comes from Latin salarium, which ultimately comes from sal, meaning salt.

04:56In ancient Rome, a salarium was a wage paid to somebody so that they could buy salt and other

05:01household goods. The word salad ultimately derives from the same root, sal, because a salad was a

05:06cold dish that was seasoned with salt. This comes from the Etymology subreddit.

05:11What's going on with the word child? Why does it pluralize into children rather than child?

05:16Child goes all the way back to Old English, which had multiple methods of forming a plural.

05:21One of the plurals for the word child in Old English was CHILDRU. During Middle English,

05:24this became CHILDRU. However, at a later moment in time, for some reason, people decided that this

05:29didn't look enough like a plural. So they added a second plural ending, N as in Ox, Oxen,

05:36to create the word CHILDREN. So it actually has two plural endings stacked on top of each other.

05:41It's equivalent to saying CHILDRU. So this is a bit of a grisly story.

05:53During the American Civil War, a deadline was a literal boundary around a prison that prisoners

05:58were not allowed to cross without being in danger of being shot. From that, a deadline came to be

06:02used metaphorically to mean a point of no return. And that's where we get the sense of a date on which

06:07something is due. Jaybird3570 asks, why are there multiple words that mean the same thing?

06:14There are actually very few true synonyms in English or in other languages. You know,

06:19words that have exactly the same meaning in all contexts. Even if two words appear to have exactly

06:24the same meaning, they will tend to be used in somewhat different contexts. For example,

06:29big and large. You could say that you have big ideas, you're a big spender, but then you end up in

06:34big trouble. However, no one would say that they have large ideas, they're a large spender, or they

06:38end up in large trouble. And that's because we're very comfortable using the word big in literal and

06:43figurative contexts, but we prefer to use the word large only with its literal meaning. Sometimes

06:48multiple synonyms exist because of language borrowing. For example, in English we have the

06:53words kingly, royal, and regal. They all mean the same thing, but kingly comes from English king,

06:59royal comes from French roi, meaning king, and regal comes from Latin rex, also meaning king.

07:05Dworkphone asks, is there any reason for the alphabet being in the order it's in? The clue is in the name.

07:11The word alphabet comes from alphabeta, which are the first two letters of the Greek alphabet,

07:15and they correspond to Latin A and B. Exactly how the letters ended up in this order, A, B, C,

07:20or A, B, C, or A, B, C is not known. It might have been random to an extent, but it's also worth

07:28noting that a lot of these sounds are the first sounds that human babies make when they first

07:33start babbling. A, A, B, B, C, C, C, D, D. The Latin alphabet ultimately derives from the Greek alphabet,

07:40which in turn ultimately derives from the Phoenician alphabet. And in all of these alphabets,

07:44the letter order starts out in the same way, although the sounds attached to those letters aren't exactly

07:50the same. When the Latin alphabet spread to other languages in Europe and beyond,

07:54they tended to keep the same order of letters. This is a question from Quora.

07:57Why do some languages have formal and informal versions of you, but English does not?

08:03There's a bit of backstory to this question. Initially, English had two second-person plural

08:08pronouns, thou and you. Thou was for addressing a singular person. You was for addressing more than

08:14one person. However, over time, because of the influence of French, in which the plural pronoun

08:19vous can also be used as a polite pronoun, you became a respectful way of addressing a single

08:25person as well. And at that point, thou started to fall out of use, because if you was a respectful

08:31way of addressing one person, then if you called someone thou, it implied that you disrespected them.

08:36So after that happened, thou eventually fell out of the language. So English was left with you as its only

08:42second-person plural. Obviously, the problem with this is you can no longer easily distinguish between

08:45singular and plural. What some people have since done is they have coined new second-person plural

08:51pronouns, like your and yins in Pittsburgh, and use, which is used in Scotland and Ireland and some

08:57other places. Bounsem asks, why do we say it's raining cats and dogs, but not any other animals?

09:02There are a couple of theories about where this expression came from. Some people say that it's because

09:06medieval people used to keep their livestock and pets on the roof, and during heavy rain they would fall

09:10through the thatch. Seems unlikely. Other people say it's because during heavy rains dead animals

09:16in the gutters of London would float down the streets. But it's worth noting that there is an

09:19earlier idiom, which is they agree like cats and dogs, which means two people don't agree at all,

09:24they're constantly fighting. So it's possible that that meaning then informed the expression

09:28it's raining cats and dogs, as in it's raining so hard it's like the weather is fighting outside.

09:33Yokonaut asks, does the language you speak make you feel and think differently? And if, how so?

09:39So linguistic determinism is the technical term for the belief that the language we speak

09:45fundamentally controls and limits the way we can think. In the strong form this obviously isn't

09:50true. If it were true, we would never be able to learn a new concept unless we already knew the

09:55word for them. And we also wouldn't be able to learn a second language unless it's vocabulary mapped

09:59exactly onto our first language. But there is a weaker version of this hypothesis called linguistic

10:04relativity, which is just the suggestion that yeah, maybe language does affect the way we think

10:09to an extent. And there is some evidence for this. For example, some linguists did a study where they

10:15showed native speakers of German and Spanish a series of pictures of objects. And it just so

10:21happened that those objects had names in Spanish and German that had different grammatical genders

10:26in the two languages. And what they found was when they asked speakers of those languages to describe

10:31the objects they saw, the speakers would tend to use adjectives that reflected certain cultural

10:37gender stereotypes. So for example, they showed them a picture of a bridge. In Spanish, a bridge is puente,

10:42which is masculine, and Spanish speakers tended to describe the picture they saw as big and strong.

10:48But when they showed the same picture to German speakers, for whom bridge is brücke, which is

10:53feminine, those speakers tended to say that the bridge was beautiful or elegant. So clearly there is some

10:58bias that goes into how we think about language, but that doesn't mean that a speaker of German would

11:02be incapable of imagining a bridge as masculine. Sometimes you see posts on social media of people

11:08saying, here's this word in my language that is untranslatable into other languages.

11:11Wales word hiraeth, which means a sense of longing for something, possibly home, possibly something else.

11:16But the thing is, you can actually translate these words into other languages. I just translated hiraeth into

11:21English. I just had to use a sentence rather than an individual word. But clearly we can translate concepts

11:26from one language into another. Just because we don't have a direct single word for it doesn't

11:30mean that we can't fully grasp what it means in another language. And if we really want to,

11:34we can always just borrow that word from another language into our own.

11:37AXDAJQ asks, why do we say break a leg to wish someone good luck? Wouldn't breaking a leg be the

11:43opposite of good luck? The expression break a leg originates in the theatre where superstitious

11:48actors thought it was bad luck to wish someone good luck and good luck to wish someone bad luck.

11:53Derek at The Chase asks, I am curious, how do etymologists slash wordsmiths determine the

11:58pronunciation of Old English word? Thinking emoji. So there are a number of ways etymologists do this.

12:03One thing is that luckily Old English was a lot more phonetic in its writing system than modern

12:09English's. There was a much closer match between how words were spelled and how they were pronounced.

12:14Old English also borrowed its alphabet from Latin and it happens that a lot of the sounds those letters

12:19had in Latin are the same sounds they then have in Old English, which makes it a lot easier.

12:24We know what modern German and Dutch sound like, we know what modern English sounds like,

12:27so from that we can reconstruct what earlier forms of words in those languages might have sounded like

12:33and how they might have diverged based on regular processes of sound change. For example,

12:37we have the word night. In modern English it's spelled N-I-G-H-T. In Old English it was typically

12:42spelled N-I-H-T. We know that the German word for night is Nacht, which has this videfricative sound

12:48at the end. And so based on the spelling in Old English and the fact that this videfricative

12:53sound has survived in other Germanic languages, we can conclude that in Old English night was

12:58pronounced nicht. Jake Unusual asks, how do new words form, get approved and get added in the dictionary?

13:05Okay. This is volume one of the OED. It goes from A to bazooki. I couldn't bring the whole thing with

13:15me because it is 20 volumes long. The Oxford English Dictionary is an attempt to document every word,

13:20pretty much, used in the English language from the year 1150 to the present day, which is why it keeps

13:26getting longer and longer. So in theory words should never be taken out of the Oxford English Dictionary,

13:32although in practice sometimes they are. So this is basically the mother of all dictionaries in

13:36English. Any word that enters the language and gets used by enough people and stays in the language

13:40for long enough will be added to the OED eventually. Quo210 asks, why do Americans say the bee's knees to

13:47refer to something amazing? The bee's knees originated in the 1920s in flapper culture. That's when women wore

13:54long necklaces and short dresses. Bee's knees was one of a number of phrases that people used to suggest

13:59that something was beyond compare. Another one is cat's pyjamas, which still survives,

14:03but there are also a host of others that we no longer use, like the eel's ankle,

14:08the sardine's whiskers, and the elephant's instep, which I think we should bring back.

14:12This question comes from the NoStupidQuestions subreddit.

14:15Why the f*** are pineapples called pineapples when they ain't got s*** to do with pine or apples?

14:21So pineapple originally meant a pinecone, and when Europeans first encountered pineapples,

14:26they thought they resembled pinecone. That's where the word comes from.

14:30But the apple is basically the default fruit that Europeans use for talking about new fruit

14:34they've encountered in other parts of the world. So a potato used to be known as an earth apple,

14:39which is modeled after French pomme de terre. A tomato used to be called a love apple.

14:44No idea why, don't know what it has to do with love.

14:46This is from the AskSocialScience subreddit.

14:48Why did we stop using words like thou and hath and words with f on the end?

14:52So words like hath, doth, goeth, words that end with th reflect the original way

14:58of marking a verb to show that it had a third person singular subject in English.

15:03So he goeth, she hath, it doth.

15:05Around about the Middle English period, this f started to fall out of use and it was replaced by s.

15:10So she has, he has, it does, which is still the form we use today.

15:14Today we most associate words like hath with the works of William Shakespeare or the King James Bible.

15:20But interestingly, even though the word hath was commonly spelled around this time,

15:24in the early 1600s, it had already fallen out of use in the spoken language.

15:28So we actually have a spelling book from this time that tells young students that

15:32although we write the word hath and doth, we pronounce them as if they were written with an s.

15:37Has and does.

15:38So this is an instance where writing has taken longer to catch up with the spoken language.

15:43BusyConsequence697 asks,

15:45Do people rarely use those funny collective nouns?

15:48Murder of crows, etc.

15:49I mean, I guess people can use these words if they're feeling whimsical enough.

15:53So these collective nouns started out life in the Middle Ages as hunting terms.

15:58That's where we get phrases like a gaggle of geese, a herd of deer, and a siege of herons.

16:03They quickly spread to other domains of use, often with humorous intentions.

16:07So the 15th century Book of St Albans, for example, gives us a long list of collective nouns,

16:12including a drunken ship of cobblers, an eloquence of lawyers, and a superfluity of nuns.

16:17NeuroticParents asks,

16:19How did the word OK come to be used in so many languages with practically the same meaning and

16:24pronunciation?

16:25OK originated as an abbreviation of All Correct in the US in the 19th century.

16:30There is a theory that originated in the army where a particular general used to sign off documents

16:35as OK because he didn't know how to spell All Correct properly.

16:38We don't have any evidence of that.

16:39And it seems more likely that it was a deliberate joking misspelling of the words to indicate

16:43that actually things were just adequate rather than entirely satisfactory.

16:48The first evidence we have for it comes from newspapers.

16:50This is from the AskHistorians subreddit.

16:52Did people actually talk how Shakespeare wrote?

16:55Yes and no.

16:57Putting aside the fact that Shakespeare wrote in rhyme and iambic pentameter a lot of the time,

17:01he also lived at a time of intense linguistic creativity.

17:04So writers of all kinds were eager to coin new words or use old words in new ways.

17:11So much so that some people actually complained about this and objected to the rise of what

17:15they called inkhorn terms.

17:16An inkhorn is a vessel in which you would keep your ink for writing.

17:19So an inkhorn term is a word that never had any real life in the language.

17:23It's almost as if you've just plucked it straight from your inkwell on the end of your quill.

17:27In everyday language, most speakers would not have had such a vast vocabulary or

17:31contorted grammar in such unusual ways.

17:33At Jesse underscore Casino asks,

17:35Alexa, what's the origin of the word quarantine?

17:38Quarantine comes from the French 40, meaning 40,

17:40which ultimately comes from a Latin word meaning the same thing.

17:43Originally, a quarantine was a period of 40 days set aside for a special purpose, like fasting.

17:49It then changed to mean a period during which somebody was isolated from a community

17:53to prevent the spread of disease.

17:55A Quora user asks, how do words change meaning over time?

17:59Semantic change is a regular feature of all living languages.

18:03There are a number of common processes through which words change their meaning.

18:06One process is narrowing, which is when a word's meaning becomes more specific.

18:10So for example, the word girl in Old English meant a child of any gender,

18:14but then it's meaning narrowed to mean only a female child.

18:17The opposite process is broadening, which is when a word's meaning becomes more general.

18:21For instance, the word bird used to mean a little chick, a nestling, a fledgling,

18:26and it was only later that it came to mean a foul of any age.

18:30And at that point, it started to replace the word foul in the rest of the English language.

18:34Another process is amelioration, which is when a word's meaning becomes more positive over time.

18:38The word nice originally meant foolish.

18:41It then came to mean fussy, then it came to mean meticulous,

18:45then it came to mean delicate, then it came to mean attractive.

18:48The opposite process to amelioration is pejoration,

18:51which is when a word gains a more negative meaning.

18:54So kind of in the opposite process to the word nice,

18:56the word silly used to mean holy or blessed.

19:00It then came to mean innocent or harmless,

19:03then it came to mean helpless, and then it came to mean foolish.

19:06This is from the Etymology subreddit.

19:08Why does cow, pig, sheep all have different names when referring to them as food,

19:12beef, pork, lamb, but chicken, fish, or rabbit stay the same?

19:16The words beef, pork, and mutton were borrowed into English from French

19:20after the Normans invaded England.

19:22At that point in time, French became the language spoken by the nobility.

19:26The author Walter Scott suggested that the reason we had these pairs of

19:30native English words like cow, sheep, and pig,

19:34versus French words for the meat, so beef, pork, and mutton,

19:39had to do with the fact that English-speaking peasants would raise these livestock,

19:43and then they would be eaten by the French-speaking nobility.

19:46The reason that rabbit doesn't have a separate word is that

19:49there was no native English word for rabbit,

19:51because they didn't exist in England until the Normans brought them over.

19:54TinyWerewolf4650 asks,

19:57Why aren't English words pronounced as the way they are written?

20:01There are a couple of reasons that English pronunciation differs from English spelling.

20:04One is sound change.

20:06Words have changed their pronunciation over time,

20:08but we haven't updated the spelling to match.

20:10Another reason is language borrowing.

20:12So English has borrowed a lot of words from other languages

20:15that have their own different spelling systems,

20:17and sometimes these spelling systems have been partly imported into English.

20:21For example, in English, words that have PH,

20:23pronounced ph, like physics, or phlegm,

20:26are all borrowed from Greek, where there is no letter F.

20:29Another reason is folk etymology,

20:31which is when people change the spelling or pronunciation of a word

20:34due to an erroneous belief that it's related to another word.

20:37So a good example of this is the word island.

20:40Island comes from Old English Eland.

20:42It did not have an S in Old English.

20:44But during the Middle English period,

20:46English borrowed another word meaning the same thing from French,

20:49Ile, which English now pronounces isle.

20:52The reason that Ile or isle has an S in it

20:54is that the French word ultimately derives from the Latin word insula.

20:58So people thought, well, there's an S in insula,

21:00therefore we should put an S in isle,

21:02even though the S was always silent in English and in French.

21:06And once this had taken place, people thought,

21:08wait a minute, we have these two words, isle and island.

21:11They must be related.

21:12And so they inserted a silent S into the word island as well,

21:16even though historically there is no reason for it to be there.

21:19Mech HR asks,

21:20why is it that some sayings between certain languages are the same?

21:24There could be two reasons why two languages have very similar idioms.

21:27One could be because there are some basic metaphors that many languages share.

21:31For example, the Spanish idiom,

21:32echar leña al fuego, means literally to throw wood on the fire.

21:37In English, we would say to add fuel to the flames,

21:40but they both mean the same basic thing,

21:42which is to make a bad situation worse.

21:44The reason they could be so similar is just that the idea

21:46that conflict or danger equals fire is one that is found as a basic metaphor in many languages.

21:52Another reason that languages could have similar idioms is

21:54because one language has just literally translated an idiom from another language.

21:58A Quora user asks, why is the word muscle pronounced muscle?

22:03So muscle is one of a group of words in English where there's a silent letter in the base word,

22:08but then that letter gets pronounced in an adjective form.

22:10Other words in this category include condemn to condemn nation and phlegm to phlegmatic.

22:17The reason for this has to do with rules around syllable structures in English.

22:21There are certain combinations of consonants that are not allowed to occur together

22:25at the beginning or an end of an English syllable.

22:27So for instance, the sound sequence muscul, S-C-L,

22:31is not really permitted in English syllable structures, so instead we drop the C.

22:36However, in the word muscular, a U is added to the middle of the word,

22:39and that breaks up the syllable boundary so that now we have mus-cu-la.

22:43That consonant cluster no longer exists.

22:45The word muscle comes from Latin musculus, which literally translates as little mouse.

22:50Apparently the Romans thought that muscles look like small critters running up and down your skin.

22:55Ed Lincoln 6 says,

22:56words with the same spelling and pronunciation, but different etymologies.

23:00So these would be known as homonyms.

23:02For instance, bat, as in the winged creature, and bat, as in the stick of wood.

23:05Some of these are true homonyms, as in they come from separate roots,

23:08but actually a lot of words that look like homonyms do share a root.

23:12For example, bank, as in a riverside, and bank, the place where you keep your money.

23:16These actually derive from the same Germanic root, which originally meant a slope.

23:20From there it came to mean a shoreline, the land sloping down to a river,

23:24and also a counter on which you would exchange money.

23:27Colombo Sabani asks, how do etymologists even find out the meaning of the word?

23:31How do they know where to look back to?

23:33So it is rare for words to appear out of nowhere.

23:37A new word is often a blend or a compound of two existing words,

23:40or it's an existing word that's changed.

23:42A noun has become a verb, or an adjective has become a noun.

23:45If none of those cases apply, then an etymologist will look at other languages

23:49that the word might have been borrowed from,

23:51and they'll try to trace back the earliest known use of that particular word.

23:54What an etymologist will have to do is to compare the word they're looking at

23:57to other words in languages they know to be related,

24:00and then reconstruct from the evidence what an earlier form of that word might have been.

24:04For example, an etymologist would work out that the word disaster in English

24:08comes from Italian disastro.

24:10From there they would work out that dis is a negative prefix.

24:13Astro means star, so disaster or disastro literally means

24:17an event that happens under a bad star.

24:19Chatongi asks, what is that R-like sound I hear between vowels when you say something like

24:25did you eat, but sounds like did you eat?

24:27Or the idea of blah blah, when meaning the idea of.

24:31So this is known as intrusive R, and it's a way of resolving vowel hiatus.

24:36So vowel hiatus is when two vowels in separate syllables

24:39come together without a consonant separating them.

24:42English speakers are very uncomfortable about this,

24:44and so when it happens we'll often insert an R to break up the hiatus.

24:49So for example, this ice cream tastes bananary.

24:52So people will insert an R as a way of avoiding the vowels being together.

24:55For instance, in an expression like Africa and Asia.

24:58RDF Porcatso asks, why is the letter R pronounced so differently in each language?

25:03So the letter R can be pronounced as an approximant ,

25:07as an alveolatril , as a uvulatril , or as a tap .

25:12And that's just in languages in Western Europe.

25:14It's thought that in the Middle Ages most Western European languages used an alveolatril,

25:19However, in the early modern period, the uvulatril started to become fashionable in France

25:24and then later in Germany.

25:25And in English, around the same time, the trill was replaced with the approximate ,

25:30which is easier to say, although it doesn't sound as good.

25:33One of the major reasons for sound change is ease of articulation,

25:36that and changing fashions.

25:37There is often no more logic to it than that.

25:39I hope you learned something today.

25:41Thanks for listening.

25:41See you next time.

25:42See you next time.

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