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Etymology of 'force'
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
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/.)
either "bibabial" or "labial" did not make much of a difference for the general audience ;)
Lemme repeat again: either "bibabial" or "labial" or "bilabial" did not make much of a difference for the general audience ;)
Wow, this has really gotten out of hand. But there is a difference, because "bilabial" doesn't include [f].
For the record, the general adudience didnt know the meaning of such terms so it does not matter whether "bilabial" includes [f] or not. :)
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.
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'.
Origine française : <force>, <pork>, <fort>, <sport>, <form>, <fork> & <divorce>.
<<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'?
<fork> : milieu du XVe siècle
<form> : début XIIIe <force> : début XIVe <sport> : début XVe
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?
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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