Adding patois and Haiti to this constellation of words shifts the linguistic lens toward the colonial world and the complex, often violent, processes by which languages are born, suppressed, and transformed. Patois is a word that carries its own prejudice embedded within it: derived from Old French, it originally suggested rough, clumsy speech — the…
Tag: Linguistics
Drachm, Phlegm, and Thumb
These three words share a fascinating silent consonant — the silent “b” in thumb, the silent “g” in phlegm, and the silent “ch” in drachm — and each of those silent letters is a kind of fossil, a remnant of an older pronunciation that speech gradually smoothed away while spelling stubbornly preserved it. This phenomenon,…
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