Wednesday, March 01, 2006

Aks the aminals about pasghetti

Neat thing I learned this week:

"Bird" and "first" used to be "brid" and "frist" in Old English. So the switching of sounds within a word (called metathesis if you must know) eventually solidified, changing the standard of English we use today.

4 comments:

Andy said...

Something about the word "pasghetti" makes me giggle. My sister used to say it as a child.

The word "milk" used to be "mlek" in some old language that I can't be bothered to look up. And "flim" is Swedish Chef-ese for "film."

Anca said...

Swedish Chef, the puppet?

Andy said...

Yeah, I forget if I heard him say "flim" on the Muppet Show or in one of the Muppet movies. I think I've heard human beings say it too. Maybe the "lm" at the end is hard to say for some people.

Anca said...

There's something easier about the "fl" than the "lm," for sure.

Then you have things like flim flam, but I'm not sure what that gobbledegook means.