"Doublets" are a pair of words that have ultimately the same origin but today have different forms because they have taken different paths to Modern English.
Some examples:
skirt, shirt. Skirt is the Scandinavian form of the same word (the relationship of England, and English, to Scandinavian languages would be too much of a digression at this point).
pyre, fire. Pyre comes more directly from Greek and was borrowed into English more recently.
wake, watch. These deserve to be the subject of their own blog post.
lemon, lime. These two words are doublets because they originally were one word.
Chef, chief.
No comments:
Post a Comment