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English is weird

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Gyrre:
If I'm not retreading here, "hold your [xyz]" as a means of saying 'wait'. I know it's got military uses (i.e. "hold your fire" or simply "hold"), but how did it come about in the first place? Was it orginally a variant of 'halt' and diverged from there?


--- Quote from: pwhodges on 13 Nov 2021, 10:38 ---As a change from different pronunciations of the same letters (see "ough"), I offer widely varied spellings of the same sound.

Eight and ate (in some dialects) sound the same; but here are two less-known spellings with the same sound: ait and eyot - which are in fact also the same word historically, meaning a small, possibly temporary, island in a river, typically but not only the Thames.

--- End quote ---

Knowing that Thames is said "Tims", I'm scared to ask how those are pronounced.

[EDIT: fixed the html coding]

pwhodges:

--- Quote from: Gyrre on 19 Jan 2022, 23:14 ---Knowing that Thames is said "Tims",
--- End quote ---

Eh? For me the vowel is the same as e in "het up"; unlike the river Thame (vowel is like "same").

But I live in Oxford, where the Thames is called the Isis (the origin's the same - they are both contractions of the Latin name: Thamesis)

pwhodges:

--- Quote from: Gyrre on 19 Jan 2022, 23:14 ---If I'm not retreading here, "hold your [xyz]" as a means of saying 'wait'. I know it's got military uses (i.e. "hold your fire" or simply "hold"), but how did it come about in the first place? Was it orginally a variant of 'halt' and diverged from there?
--- End quote ---

I expect the original version was "hold your horses", which can readily be seem as literal - preventing them moving or bolting, rather than stopping (halting) them once started.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hold_your_horses

Gyrre:

--- Quote from: pwhodges on 20 Jan 2022, 02:50 ---
--- Quote from: Gyrre on 19 Jan 2022, 23:14 ---Knowing that Thames is said "Tims",
--- End quote ---

Eh? For me the vowel is the same as e in "het up"; unlike the river Thame (vowel is like "same").

But I live in Oxford, where the Thames is called the Isis (the origin's the same - they are both contractions of the Latin name: Thamesis)

--- End quote ---

So it's more said like "Tem"?
 I suppose, then, that there's at least one particularly strange village near it that one must cross a marsh to get to?

Thrillho:

--- Quote from: jwhouk on 19 Jan 2022, 17:38 ---But the question is, how many holes in the Blackbourne section? I heard they counted them all once upon a time.

--- End quote ---

It's actually Blackburn, birthplace of my ex wife funnily enough

Also now they know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall

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