Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2020 January 4

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January 4

The oo vowel

Why is the oo vowel sound (in the word boot) so rare at the beginnings of words in English?? (Ooze is one of the few words beginning with it.) Georgia guy (talk) 15:46, 4 January 2020 (UTC)

Do you mean ʊu̯, u, ɵu̯, u̟, ʊu̯, ʉu̯, ɤʊ̯, ɤu̯, ʊ̈y, ʏy, ʉ̞u̟, ʉː, uː, əʉ, ɨ, ʊː, u̟ː, ɵʊ̯, or any of the other various sounds that <oo> in "boot" represents in all of the various English dialects? Anyway, words like "out" used to begin with /uː/ in Middle English but that sound evolved to /aʊ/ as part of the Great Vowel Shift. As for why that specific change happened, your guess is as good as anybody else's -- as I think other editors have summed up nicely here recently in these types of questions.--William Thweatt ^TalkContribs 19:29, 4 January 2020 (UTC)

The dialect variant doesn't matter, but please note that it's likewise true that Middle English had the sound of English long o minus the w sound and that that sound evolved to the modern oo sound as part of the same shift. What makes it so that there are not many words that begin with this sound?? Georgia guy (talk) 19:43, 4 January 2020 (UTC)

I thought that surely there would have to be OOdles of them, so I went to my dictionary, but you're right, there aren't. HiLo48 (talk) 22:51, 4 January 2020 (UTC)

This is clearly a case for WP:SOFIXIT. Georgia guy needs to invent oodles of new words that start with "oo", and get other people to use them! --142.112.159.101 (talk) 09:15, 5 January 2020 (UTC)

There's a few in Australian English, generally derived from Aboriginal languages. The best known is probably Uluru. But that can't really be said to be English. HiLo48 (talk) 10:56, 5 January 2020 (UTC)

Please note that I want to know why. Georgia guy (talk) 12:31, 5 January 2020 (UTC)

For what purpose? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 18:04, 5 January 2020 (UTC)

Why does wanting to know why something is the way it is need a purpose? Surely the pursuit of knowledge is a purpose in and of itself? Fgf10 (talk) 18:08, 5 January 2020 (UTC)

It's an interesting question that I want to know the answer to. Georgia guy (talk) 18:11, 5 January 2020 (UTC)

I think this is a question that cannot actually be answered. We can describe how a language changed, but there is little to no hope of finding out what factor or factors may have caused that change. (And predicting such changes ahead of time is impossible.) The phenomenon is simply too complex to make your question meaningful. If we were to somehow rewind time to before this change happened and then let things proceed from there, there is no reason to expect that the changes to the language would follow the same patterns they have in reality. History is contingent. The "butterfly effect" and all that. --Khajidha (talk) 22:08, 5 January 2020 (UTC)

For one thing, the OP's premise that it is "rare" is a subjective opinion. It's certainly much more common than English words starting with "ooo", for example. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 02:35, 6 January 2020 (UTC)

What manner of comment is that? Are there ANY standard words in English that have a triple letter anywhere in them? -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 15:52, 6 January 2020 (UTC)

He's claiming it's "rare". Compared to what? ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 20:34, 6 January 2020 (UTC)

Jack of Oz -- Some people prefer "freeer" and "freeest" as the comparative and superlative of "free", but these are apparently disfavored by dictionaries: [1], [2]. Then there's "agreeeth" (archaic bisyllabic form of the third person singular verb "agrees"). Otherwise they're all onomatopoeia ("brrr") or missing hyphens ("crosssection"), or creative/extended spellings ("yesss!"). --- AnonMoos (talk) 23:44, 6 January 2020 (UTC)

And what about quadruple letters? Can one who is freed be said to be a freeee? --Theurgist (talk) 03:32, 8 January 2020 (UTC)

The questioner is likely to find it more productive to seek why something is rather than why something is not. Eg: "Why do so many words having to do with order and authority start with the letter R?" is an answerable question, but "Why don't they start with X?" is not. Temerarius (talk) 19:12, 5 January 2020 (UTC)

It also depends on what sort of meaning of "why" they're after. "What made this happen..." is unanswerable for the reasons noted by Khajidha above; language change is not a deterministic process, and so there is no repeatable and definable cause in that sense. If they instead are looking for "What happened before it", that is the sort of non-causative antecedents, we can answer that. Lots of historical linguistics is based on tracking what changes do happen; but the predictive power of such events is poor. --Jayron32 16:09, 7 January 2020 (UTC)

I once had a teacher from Boston, Lincolnshire who pronounced "human" as "ooman", but I expect that doesn't count. Alansplodge (talk) 21:43, 5 January 2020 (UTC)

Back to the Great Vowel Shift: if there were words now starting in "oo", they would have been shifted there from words starting in the sound in modern "book", at least according to John McWhorter in his Words on the Move. We don't have any of those either, do we? --jpgordon^{𝄢𝄆 𝄐𝄇} 23:57, 6 January 2020 (UTC)

Wrong. The oo sound as in boot was the sound in go without the w sound at the end before the shift; that is, the word boot was pronounced similar to the way boat is today. Georgia guy (talk) 00:08, 7 January 2020 (UTC)

Or to put it another way, similar to the way Boot is pronounced today in German. (From the general European perspective Old English had a phonetic spelling system :) 89.172.38.145 (talk) 07:43, 10 January 2020 (UTC)