Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2021 November 10

= November 10 =

Two kinds of words
Please explain the difference between 2 kinds of words by revealing the common etymology of words of each kind that are native to English:


 * 1) One-syllable words ending in -all that have the "aw" sound.
 * 2) One-syllable words ending in -al that have the short a sound.

What is the standard etymology for each kind of word assuming the word is native to English?? (A valid answer, leaving the truth unspecified, is that words of the latter kind are usually either of French origin or are modern coinages.) Georgia guy (talk) 01:05, 10 November 2021 (UTC)
 * Some examples would help. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 02:30, 10 November 2021 (UTC)
 * Wiktionary has many examples. Please look up any word that meets the criteria of each of the 2 kinds of words we're discussing here and click on the link to the "Rhymes" page that shows that the word has rhymes. Georgia guy (talk) 02:33, 10 November 2021 (UTC)
 * Start with the word "mall" and note how Americans rhyme it with "call", while Brits rhyme it with "pal". ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 02:34, 10 November 2021 (UTC)
 * Please don't generalise, nor present as fact what you are only guessing. "Brits" have many accents. My own English one pronounces "mall" with a short "a" when it's in the name The Mall ; but long when we accidentally use the American import for what we more practically call a "shopping centre", . Bazza (talk) 11:26, 10 November 2021 (UTC)
 * I'm not "guessing", I'm telling you what a British former work colleague told me, specifically to point out the difference. He's well-educated, so he should know what he's talking about. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 12:17, 10 November 2021 (UTC)
 * You stated that Brits rhyme "mall" with "pal". Some Brits might well do that in all meanings of the word, others do not. I'm telling you first-hand as a well-educated native southern-English British English speaker with several decades of experience who knows what they talking about that you are wrong to make that unqualified statement. In this discussion in particular, your assertion is not helpful to the OP. Bazza (talk) 12:31, 10 November 2021 (UTC)
 * I would agree with, the road in London rhymes with pal, the American term for a shopping centre rhymes with maul. DuncanHill (talk) 12:35, 10 November 2021 (UTC)
 * That's exactly what I'm saying. See the IPA for Pall Mall, London. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 12:37, 10 November 2021 (UTC)
 * That's not what you said. You said British people rhymed "mall" with "pal". You did not qualify your statement to say that different usages of the word have different pronunciations. DuncanHill (talk) 12:40, 10 November 2021 (UTC)
 * Sorry about the lack of clarity. I should have said that Brits rhyme "mall" with the way Americans say "pal". ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 12:43, 10 November 2021 (UTC)
 * British people use two different pronunciations of "mall" depending on the meaning. One rhymes with "pal", one with "Paul". Are you saying that Americans rhyme "pal" with "Paul"? DuncanHill (talk) 12:52, 10 November 2021 (UTC)
 * Not normally. Also, I listened to the Wiktionary pronunciation of "pal" by a Brit, and it sounds like "pow" (to rhyme with the way I would say "now"), like the trailing "L" isn't there. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 12:58, 10 November 2021 (UTC)
 * That is L-vocalization and is a feature of London dialects, but not many others. Alansplodge (talk) 17:10, 10 November 2021 (UTC)
 * Rather than get us to do all your leg-work, how about you go to Wiktionary, find words that meet the criteria of each of the 2 kinds of words you've asked questions about and click on the links to the "Rhymes" pages that shows that each word has rhymes. Then come back here with the list and you may find helpful people who will answer your question about standard etymology. Bazza (talk) 11:26, 10 November 2021 (UTC)
 * Can you identify, preferably using IPA notation, which phoneme is designated by "the short a sound"? --Lambiam 10:41, 10 November 2021 (UTC)
 * Why do you want me to use IPA notation?? It's simply the sound in the word "cat", which all anglophones know as the short a sound. Georgia guy (talk) 11:11, 10 November 2021 (UTC)
 * The letter "a" makes several sounds in English, and not all dialects agree on all of them, which is why precision is needed in describing exactly which sound you mean. The term "short a" has a vague meaning, especially since linguistically vowel length is not even itself an agreed upon term.  Assuming you don't mean /eɪ/ (which is the sound in words like "face"), the other possible sounds made by "a" include /æ/ (trap), /ɑ/ (palm), and /eə/ (square).  And this will vary from dialect to dialect; words pronounced with a /æ/ in some dialects may be pronounced with a /ɑ/ in others (classically "bath", for example).  -- Jayron 32 12:16, 10 November 2021 (UTC)
 * I clearly mean the sound in trap; the sound in face is long a. Georgia guy (talk) 12:21, 10 November 2021 (UTC)
 * By now, you could have made two lists of such words and investigated their etymologies yourself - instead of expecting others to do that work for you. ←Baseball Bugs What's up, Doc? carrots→ 12:24, 10 November 2021 (UTC)

Oh; let me explain why this is interesting. The letter L is one of only a few final consonants in English that is doubled at the end of a word after a short vowel. Words ending in -ell or -ill have nothing special here; it's -all and -al which are special. I assume words ending in -all (with the aw sound) have similar etymologies to those ending in -ell or -ill; but those ending in -al (with the short a sound in the word cat) are likely modern coinages. Georgia guy (talk) 12:47, 10 November 2021 (UTC)
 * here is an online rhyming dictionary. You can use it to find many major English words that end the way you want them to.  Here is etymonline.  It's a very good online etymology dictionary.  There you go.  If either of those websites confuse you, please let us know so we can help you operate them.  -- Jayron 32 12:49, 10 November 2021 (UTC)
 * It's a fair question about a historical sound change rule, and 's basic assumption (inherited -all ( vs. borrowed -a ) seems to be correct. Mall is a special case as this is derived from a loan that adopted the final «ll» from French. So in The Mall is historically correct, while  in the derived noun looks like a spelling pronunciation.
 * A real exception is shall. The short a must be a result of its prosodic position in the clause which is per default unstressed.
 * Fun fact: for Germans, stressed before  in English words is perceived as an iron rule, which has lead to the common mispronunciation of PayPal as  ("PayPaul"). I can ever remember having heard (older) Germans saying /ɔ:l dʒəˈroʊ/. But especially because of, most Germans at least know how to pronounce "Al" nowadays. –Austronesier (talk) 12:45, 11 November 2021 (UTC)
 * Paypaul is, of course, a sister company to Robpeter. —Tamfang (talk) 02:12, 13 November 2021 (UTC)