[HN Gopher] Loss of Mid in English: Free Peasantry and Their Lin...
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Loss of Mid in English: Free Peasantry and Their Linguistic
Advantage
Author : diodorus
Score : 44 points
Date : 2023-07-16 00:38 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (onlinelibrary.wiley.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (onlinelibrary.wiley.com)
| permo-w wrote:
| is there no possibility that the word "with" is just a corruption
| of "mid" in the first place?
| bradrn wrote:
| Aside from the other sibling comments, on why _with_ and _mid_
| always were separate words, it's worth noting that this sort of
| thing just doesn't really happen in the first place. Words can
| get randomly corrupted, but there's generally a clear
| perceptual reason behind it: common processes include, say,
| switching adjacent consonants (e.g. Old English _bridd_ -
| _bird_ ), or deletion of unstressed or repeated syllables (e.g.
| _library_ - colloqual pronunciation _libry_ ). Random change
| doesn't tend to cause wholesale change of the whole word. And
| especially not in a way which makes it _harder_ to pronounce:
| the /th/ sound tends to be rather unstable, and many dialects
| of English have systematically lost it.
| permo-w wrote:
| if /th/ is so unstable, why does it exist at all? because /t/
| or /d/ sounds become corrupted to /th/ sounds. do you think
| the word brother always had a /th/ in the middle?
|
| much like when football referees slow down a tackle using VAR
| and lose the real sense of power of the challenge, when you
| slowly and academically look at written examples of words,
| you lose the sense of how the words are actually used in
| practice. conjunctive words like mid and with are almost
| exclusively said at high speed with almost all emphasis on
| the vowel and in practice sound almost exactly the same,
| especially when coming off the back of a consonant
| bradrn wrote:
| > if /th/ is so unstable, why does it exist at all?
|
| You misunderstand me. I am saying that _random, irregular
| change_ is _unlikely_ to create the sound /th/ (or /th/ in
| phonetic notation, which I'll use from now on). As you
| correctly note, by itself that means very little, but it
| does reinforce all the other evidence I and others have
| mentioned.
|
| (The sound in the word 'brother' was formed via a different
| process: it is the product of _regular_ sound change,
| specifically Grimm's Law
| [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grimm's_law]. This converted
| all voiceless stop sounds to fricatives: if /p/-/f/ and
| /k/-/x/, it makes sense that /t/-/th/ too, because that
| follows the same pattern.)
| canjobear wrote:
| No, the sound change m>w is not otherwise attested, and _with_
| has a clear etymological relationship to Proto-Germanic
| _*withro_ , which is also reflected in things like (slightly
| archaic) German _wider_ "against".
| permo-w wrote:
| the sound change doesn't have to be otherwise attested. that
| is a general feature of nouns and more heavily focused on
| words. mid/with are conjunctions, almost exclusively rapidly
| pronounced with little emphasis on their consonants, easily
| becoming corrupted and merged and changed without the need
| for general language shifts
| canjobear wrote:
| It is true that very frequent words (whether nouns,
| prepositions, conjunctions, or whatever part of speech) can
| undergo one-off changes, usually involving dropping
| syllables. But the phonetic details don't make sense here
| as a reduction: _with_ is arguably harder to pronounce than
| _mid_.
|
| You're basically arguing for a rare and poorly understood
| kind of lexical change with no evidence to support it,
| against a well-understood and very common kind of change
| with multiple different strands of converging evidence.
|
| It's not impossible that the phonological similarity of
| "mid" and "with" made it easier for the meanings to
| coalesce in "with". But it is certain, at least as certain
| as you can get in historical linguistics, that these were
| originally two prepositions with independent origins.
| bradrn wrote:
| > the sound change doesn't have to be otherwise attested.
|
| Somewhat counterintuitively, historical evidence shows that
| most sound changes are regular! Which means they affect all
| words satisfying the same condition in the same way [0].
| Irregular sound changes still occur, but if you look at the
| history of a language, regular sound change suffices to
| explain almost all developments.
|
| Focussing on the history of English (which is very well
| documented, e.g. [1]) shows this well. Consonantal changes
| tend to be very regular: for instance, final /NGg/-/NG/ in
| most dialects. English has an unusually complex vowel
| system, so vocalic changes tend to be somewhat more
| chaotic, but still show regularity: e.g. /a/ regularly
| turned into either /ae/ or /a/.
|
| (See also @canjobear's comment, which makes the same point
| in a nice way:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36758576)
|
| [0] This is the 'Neogrammarian hypothesis':
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neogrammarian
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phonological_history_of_E
| nglis...
| gpvos wrote:
| Not really. It's not so hard to follow the etymology sections
| in Wiktionary. A few clicks down you find:
| with: from Proto-Indo-European *wi-tero-s, from *wi ("apart") +
| *-teros mid: from Proto-Indo-European *meth2, from *me
| ("with")
| mootothemax wrote:
| From the article:
|
| _The first group of views... pins down the disappearance of
| MID as the need to eliminate excessive expressions and
| redundant synonyms under MID 's competition with WID in the
| collocational phrases._
|
| _The second group of views ... establishes a push chain and a
| drag chain movement between the three prepositions: MID, WID
| and AGAINST._
|
| _The third group... observes the cognitive advantage of
| spatial sense in the survival of prepositions and explains WID
| 's victory over MID..._
|
| And concludes its introduction with:
|
| _All three camps of opinions were confined to theoretical
| hypotheses lacking a quantitative approach, nor was due
| attention paid to the grand sociolinguistic backdrop of the
| English feudal society. Therefore, this paper aims to build on
| the previous research by introducing linguistic data based on
| quantitative methods, as well as connecting the change to the
| grander socioeconomic background of the medieval society._
| permo-w wrote:
| yes, I read this. your point is?
| Eiim wrote:
| According to the paper, both words coexisted during Old
| English. It is less concerned about how they got there and more
| interested in how with took over once they were both
| established.
| permo-w wrote:
| words can co-exist and still be corruptions of each other
| metacritic12 wrote:
| Seems like the literature has a pretty good empirical
| understanding of the divergence of these two words.
|
| I wouldn't say "no" possibility, but it seems like an
| interesting lay theory can be true a startling fraction of the
| time, but to prove its truth probably involves wading through
| decades of established research from centuries ago.
|
| For example, if it's just a corruption, you should expect the
| two words to rarely occur with different meanings within a
| corpus. I don't know about the 8th century corpus, but if it
| happens there, that would be strong evidence against the
| corruption theory. Also the article mentions in German the two
| are still separate.
| Zach_the_Lizard wrote:
| Apparently the two words are unrelated in origin.
|
| "With" originally meant something closer to "against," whereas
| "mid" was closer to "with" in today's English.
|
| Over time, "with" changed meanings, we gained the word
| "against" and "mid" survives in fossil form in words like
| "midwife."
| permo-w wrote:
| it seems like far too much of a coincidence to me that the
| words sound almost identical in fast spoken language
| canjobear wrote:
| Words don't usually change in a one-off way. If you see a
| change from m to w in one word, you're likely to see it in
| another word in the same language. For example, in going
| from Proto-Germanic to English there was a general shift to
| drop the sound n before fricative sounds, as is apparent in
| multiple words: English five vs. German funf, English us
| vs. German uns, English soft vs. German sanft. In the case
| of mid and with, we don't see other instances of m turning
| into w. Coupled with the fact that mid and with used to
| coexist, and they have plausible etymologies arising from
| independent sources in Proto-Indo-European, the
| preponderance of the evidence is for independent origins
| for the two words.
| memsom wrote:
| Both words exist in Swedish - med and vid, and med means
| "with" and vid means more like "at".
| einherjae wrote:
| Vid isnt closer to "by"?
|
| (Asking as a Norwegian, since "ved" is "by" or "beside")
| kaladin-jasnah wrote:
| And in a completely unrelated derivation, the word "mid"
| means "not very good" in Gen Z slang.
| canjobear wrote:
| Not totally unrelated: they both come from Proto-Indo-
| European root _*me_ meaning middle, via different routes.
| permo-w wrote:
| it means average. as in mid-tier
| gbear605 wrote:
| It literally means average, but in actual usage it means
| bad. For example, if an outfit is described as "mid", the
| implication is that the outfit is bad and the person
| should not be wearing it. Maybe this is because more than
| half of everything is bad?
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| It's not that more than half of everything is bad
| (technically this can't be, if by "bad" we mean "worse
| than average"); it's more of a social interplay issue.
| The specific example you gave:
|
| > _if an outfit is described as "mid", the implication is
| that the outfit is bad and the person should not be
| wearing it._
|
| I'd say most people on the Internet have been conditioned
| since childhood to deliver and expect "white lies" on
| such topics. The _actual_ mid-tier /average outfit is
| indicated by nonspecific reactions such as "you look
| great!". Saying "this looks average" is pretty much an
| insult. Greatness, or extreme badness, are communicated
| by expending extra effort on description, delivery or
| acts surrounding it. Similar phenomenon applies to pretty
| much anything involving descriptions of individuals or
| their choices.
|
| In the extreme, you get the supposed[0] German way of
| doing employee references, where a reference is _never_
| in any way negative, but if it looks ordinary, like
| "Person X is never late", it is to be mentally prefixed
| with "Literally the only good thing we can say about them
| is that...".
|
| This kind of heavily biased distribution of scales seems
| to be a wider thing in general. Obvious examples are all
| kinds of star ratings on-line: in e-commerce, in app
| stores, delivery services, restaurants, etc.: 5 stars out
| of 5 is "good", 4 stars is "meh", anything below is
| strictly negative.
|
| From my own life, I remember one pre-internet case:
| school grades. On a scale of 1-5, with 6 being awarded
| for extraordinary achievements, the actual scale - as
| perceived by teachers, parents and students - was: 1-3 =
| various shades of bad; 4 = meh/average; 5 = what parents
| expect you should be getting by default; 6 = what parents
| expect you to get if you show minimum effort.
|
| --
|
| [0] - Something I've read about multiple times on HN.
| [deleted]
| permo-w wrote:
| this isn't how I've heard it used
| bgribble wrote:
| My gen Z kids use it to mean something significantly
| worse than "average". If something is "mid", it's really
| pretty gross or unappealing.
| tetraca wrote:
| Nobody wants anything average.
| 98codes wrote:
| More like mediocre; average, perhaps, but unacceptably
| so.
| croisillon wrote:
| "wider" in German still means counter/against
| 100k wrote:
| If this interests you, I recommend The History of English
| podcast. The episodes on Old English cover similar linguistic
| evolution that happened due the influence of Old Norse.
|
| https://historyofenglishpodcast.com/
| pge wrote:
| Interesting that the Oppositional use of WID is shown as going to
| zero (presumably in favor of 'against' that filled that semantic
| space), yet that is still a reasonably common usage in modern
| English. "David fought with Goliath" is used to mean "David
| fought against Goliath" (oppositional) or "David fought together
| with Goliath against a common opponent" (parallel).
|
| In any case, the replacement of MID with WID (bringing with it
| some elements of 'against') explains some linguistic quirks I
| have noticed as a speaker of both English and German as to the
| differences between 'mit' (German) and 'with' (English), one of
| which is that 'mit' is not used to denote opposition
| ('gegen'='against' is used instead), while 'with' can be used
| that way.
| User23 wrote:
| My German is a little rusty, but I feel like the counterpart
| WID has disappeared from contemporary German. It's interesting
| that German and English diverged that way.
| gpvos wrote:
| The modern German cognates are wider (against) and wieder
| (again, back), the common ancestor word being withra. The
| English Wiktionary is a great etymological dictionary.
| gpvos wrote:
| In Dutch (which is in some ways "in between" German and
| English, but usually closer to German), "vechten met" can
| indicate either opposition or parallelness.
| yorwba wrote:
| In German, too, "kampfen mit" could be either ("miteinander"
| and "zusammen" allowing to distinguish between the two if
| necessary) and other verbs denoting opposition like
| "streiten" or "hadern" are basically always used with "mit".
| So GP was a bit hasty in declaring that "mit" is not used for
| opposition.
| pge wrote:
| Interesting - has the usage of 'mit' with 'kampfen' changed
| over time? I haven't lived in Germany for over 25 years,
| but when I first learned German, we were told very directly
| not to use 'mit' in that way with 'kampfen' (i.e. that
| 'kampfen mit' always meant together not against one
| another), and I don't remember hearing any exceptions to
| that when I lived there. I did notice, though, that certain
| English grammatical constructions were creeping into
| German, particularly in spoken German among young people.
| Is this one of those cases, or were my German teachers
| overly pedantic about something that wasn't strictly true?
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| I'm impressed chiefly with how such linguistic investigations can
| extract so much from the past. We're talking about wind coming
| out of mouths 600 years ago!
|
| Of course we have writings and written accounts of speech to
| reference. But there is plenty of that! Fortunately.
|
| And current linguistic traditions can tell us where various
| groups ended up, a little more data. But very indirect.
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