• @[email protected]
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    fedilink
    3410 months ago

    fun fact: the S in island is completely fucking made up, the original spelling was “iland” with “i” being cognate with “ö” in swedish. It basically means island land and the only reason why there’s an S in there is because some shithead thought it was related to the french word “isle” and felt that INCORRECT idea warranted changing the spelling.

    • no banana
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      9
      edit-2
      10 months ago

      Yep. It is indeed. Same with the K in knight, which was added for no fucking reason. Sweden also has an island called Öland which means island land.

      • @samus12345
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        English
        1110 months ago

        “Knight” used to be pronounced with the “K.” It was always there, it’s not pronouncing it that’s new.

        • no banana
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          710 months ago

          Oh yeah I confused it with some other word.

          • @samus12345
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            English
            810 months ago

            “Receipt” is a good example. A silent “P” was shoved in there to make it seem more fancy.

            • no banana
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              610 months ago

              That’s a better one!

          • @seth
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            310 months ago

            Probably “night,” which is also properly pronounced with the leading K sound.

    • @[email protected]
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      fedilink
      510 months ago

      I think what you said is slightly wrong. Island and isle are both English words that seem to have no ethymological connection. However close semantic relation of “isle” might have cause the introduction of the “s” at some point. Isle itself probably comes from latin “insula”. The French still have only one word “Île”. Germans have “Eiland” and “Insel”.

      island [OE] Despite their similarity, island has no etymological connection with isle (their resemblance is due to a 16th-century change in the spelling of island under the influence of its semantic neighbour isle). Island comes ultimately from a prehistoric Germanic *aujō, which denoted ‘land associated with water,’ and was distantly related to Latin aqua ‘water’. This passed into Old English as īeg ‘island,’ which was subsequently compounded with land to form īegland ‘island’. By the late Middle English period this had developed to iland, the form which was turned into island. (A diminutive form of Old English īeg, incidentally, has given us eyot ‘small island in a river’ [OE].)

      Isle [13] itself comes via Old French ile from Latin insula (the s is a 15th-century reintroduction from Latin). Other contributions made by insula to English include insular [17], insulate [16], insulin, isolate [via Italian) [18], and peninsula [16].

    • @MindSkipperBro12
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      310 months ago

      Can the UN declare that every school needs to replace Island with Iland?