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A comment on The Ascent of "guy" (1999). Parent comment

Re:The Ascent of "guy" (1999) by sudobash1 on Wednesday November 09, 2022 @08:04PM (#33540752)
Now that I am rambling about etymology, another cool thing: We spell and say the plural of "wife" as "wives". This is because of how the voiced "e" changed the pronunciation of the unvoiced "f" to a voiced "v". ("v" and "f" are the same sound with the only difference being if you are engaging your vocal folds or not. Same with "z" and "s", "b" and "p", and some others).

The same happened with "knife" and "knives", and the pronunciation of "path" vs "paths" (the "s" sound is voiced, and caused the "th" to be voiced as well).

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Re:The Ascent of "guy" (1999) by OJFord on Wednesday November 09, 2022 @08:51PM (#33541114)
Though curiously not 'roof', despite all being Germanically rooted.
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Re:The Ascent of "guy" (1999) by agf on Wednesday November 09, 2022 @09:19PM (#33541357)
Are you saying not "rooves" in spelling, or in pronunciation, or both? I spell it "roofs" but pronounce it "rooves". With "dwarfs" and "dwarves", it depends on context for both spelling and pronunciation I think.
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Re:The Ascent of "guy" (1999) by jihadjihad on Wednesday November 09, 2022 @09:09PM (#33541277)
It's probably due to what the parent said--the letters f and v were allophones in OE. Same reason why they are pronounced the same in German.
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Re:The Ascent of "guy" (1999) by philwelch on Wednesday November 09, 2022 @08:52PM (#33541131)
Or “dwarf”, aside from Tolkien.
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Re:The Ascent of "guy" (1999) by BerislavLopac on Friday November 11, 2022 @04:13AM (#33558625)
Tolkien actually wanted for the pural of "dwarf" to be "dwerrows", but compromised to the neutral "dwarves".
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