Re: USAGE: (YAEPT) Re: English, Masculine, Feminine

Mark J. Reed wrote:

>On Tue, Jun 15, 2004 at 03:54:56PM +1000, Tristan Mc Leay wrote:
>
>
>>/ko:t/ = caught, court, quart
>>
>>
>
>?  What happened to the /w/ in quart?
>
>
I suppose is went to sound heaven, same as the /w/ in 'sword', even if
it was a few centuries different. I think I've mentioned it here
before: in Cwo:, the /w/ is very light; in that particular word it's
gone entirely. It took me some time to remember whether 'dawdle' started
with /dwo:/ or /do:/ (it's not a word whose spelling I'm entirely
familiar with).  (Furthermore, there's hardly any lip movement in
a word like 'war', /wo:/; whereas in a word like 'woman' there's kind of
a bounce at the beginning.)

--
Tristan

>>(not that the latter is used much. In
>>fact, you probably have pretty decent odds of finding that most people
>>my age don't know what it is, let alone how much it is)
>>
>>
>
>It's an ancient word for "litre". :)
>
>-Mark
>
>

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