"I Can't Believe its Not 'Bitter'!"

I’ve wished I could learn Indo-European—had I the opportunity, and the time, and the talent. Reading the book helps, but it doesn’t quite do it for me: my ear isn’t really sharp enough to pick it up from text; I need someone sounding it in my ear.

Short of the full platter, here’s a great hors d’oeuvre: Old English and its Relatives, by Orrin W. Robinson—apparently the text book for his introductory course at Stanford. It’s not IE per se, but it’s a nice accessible introduction to a lot of issues about language structure and language change. Imagine my surprise to find that it’s going on even now as we stand here:

…sound change involves a modification in the articulation of the distinctive sounds of the language. There is an interesting example from contemporary American English, whose speakers frequently confuse such words as “bitter” and “latter” with words like “bidder” and “ladder,” all of them (and in addition words like “hitter,” “fatter.” “fitting,” “latger”) containing a d-like medial consonant. Now there is evidence that all the words written with a t were at one time pronounced with a genuine t sound. First, of course, we still write them with thre letter t. Second, many of the words involved have a pronounced t sound when one leaves off the endings: thus “hi[t],” “fa[t],” “fi[t],” “la[t]e” (where square brackets indicate a phonetic transcription. Third, we can find many English dialects where the changes haven’t taken place, especially in Britain. Finally, many of us actually still pronounce the [t] in careful speech (“I said bitter, not bidder!”).

Orrin W. Robinson, Old English and its Closest Relatives 4 (1992).