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Perhaps some of you who know a little about Middle English can help me. I'm wondering about some words like 'force' and 'port' that are spelled with 'or' but are (or were) pronounced /or/ instead of /Or/. How did these words get this vowel, and why aren't they spelled with 'ou' or one of the normal spellings for /or/? Here are some other words like this:
pork
fort
Portugal
sport
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I think I read somewhere that a preceding bilabial consonant often caused /Or/ to become /or/. (Although, much like other phenomena such as the trap-bath or lot-cloth split, this musn't have been applied with complete regularity, as shown by "form" - traditional Worcesterese ["fQ:m] ;-) - which never took /or/.)
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Sorry, by "bibabial" I mean "labial".
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Argh! By "bilabial" I mean "labial". :-D
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either "bibabial" or "labial" did not make much of a difference for the general audience ;)
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Lemme repeat again: either "bibabial" or "labial" or "bilabial" did not make much of a difference for the general audience ;)
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Wow, this has really gotten out of hand. But there is a difference, because "bilabial" doesn't include [f].
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For the record, the general adudience didnt know the meaning of such terms so it does not matter whether "bilabial" includes [f] or not. :)
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I don't know who this "general audience" is, but this is a technical discussion, so technical terms are going to be necessary. You can go look any of them up at dictionary.com.
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That seems reasonable, but if it did happen by lexical diffusion, I would expect words like 'form' and 'fork' to change before 'Portugal' and 'divorce'.
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Origine française : <force>, <pork>, <fort>, <sport>, <form>, <fork> & <divorce>.
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<<Origine française : <force>, <pork>, <fort>, <sport>, <form>, <fork> & <divorce>.>>
That's why I've been wondering about these words: they all have /Or/ [OR] in French, except fourchette (fork) /fuRSEt/. The only reason I can think of for some of these words not shifting to /or/ is that maybe they were borrowed later. Do you know if 'fork' and 'form' were borrowed later than 'force' and 'sport'?
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<fork> : milieu du XVe siècle
<form> : début XIIIe
<force> : début XIVe
<sport> : début XVe
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There goes my theory...Perhaps the /Or/ to /or/ shift (the fork-pork split?) was a lower-class thing. I suspect that in the 15th century, forks weren't used very often by the lower classes (I don't think they were even popular with the aristocracy). I guess 'form' was an upper-class or literary word during the period of the split sometime around the 13th-15th centuries. Does this seem reasonable?
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Yeah, that doesn't seem implausible. I can't think of any other reason why "fork" and "pork" would have ended up with different vowels.
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