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Here's one for you: "an apron" used to be "a napron".
Linguists call this sort of change Rebracketing
....fuuuuuuuck.
Wait until you find out that a nickname used to be an ickname
Some of them still are.
Napkin and Napron comes from the same french word, which means " small cloth". The french word comes from the Latin "mappa" which is from where we directly get the word "map".
Also “a norange” > “an orange” (in Spanish it’s “naranja”)
And it went backwards with napkin. “An apkin” > “a napkin”
Yes, but no. It was never a norange in english. English directly adopted the word orange from french, so that's the no, but yes, it was the word naranja from spanish, who took it from arab, and arancia from italian, and maybe from the word gold in french, which is "or".
I’ve never been so delighted to be wrong. Thank you—that’s fascinating.
100 years we might switch back again...
That’ll always be the dream…
Unbelievable, I find this kind of thing so fascinating. Thanks for posting.
As a child I rebracketed two words until I was corrected by spell check as a teen- A stigmatism and an acompilation (complied collection of music or stories).
Me too, that seems like a weirdly specific thing for two people on Lemmy to do.
Rebracketing buddies! 🤜
Also, "an uncle" used to be "a nuncle."