Donkey and Monkey

[doomey!]

The word Donkey is prenounced...

DON- KEY

Yet the word Monkey is prenounced..

MUN-KEY

Why is this?

[bernardo]

My dikshunry sez that "donkey" was originally pronounced "dunkey" to rhyme with "monkey" but otherwise it doesn't know the origin of either word.

[jno]

pronunciation of vowels is often unstable. Tea used to be pronounced tay. Clerk and Derby are pronounced clark and darby in Britain but have become spoken as written in the USA. My mother used to say orf and orfen for off and often. But when pronunciation changes, spelling doesn't, so you get some big discrepancies in English.

[nannon]

the mind boggles...

[Quizmonster]

For exactly the same reason that the letters 'ough' in thought, dough, borough, rough, plough, cough hiccough, through, lough, hough and sough are all pronounced differently from each other! The final three are Irish and Scottish word-forms, but all are to be heard in British regional speech.

[Quizmonster]

Incidentally, J, the drink spelt 'tea' in English is still pronounced 'tay' in most other European languages...including north of the border. So who's the odd man out eh? (I'm joking...not trying to start a jihad!)

[jno]

Quizmonster I presume it came into English (I mean like English English) straight from French... Doesn't Pope write about 'Great Anna whom three realms obey/ dost sometimes counsel take and sometimes tea'?

(By contrast the Scots have McGonagall and his silvery Tay...)

But I wonder how the spelling tea rather than tee came about.

[kissyfur]

Ive studied speech and language as a degree and its because of something called "the great vowel shift" way back in the dark ages. Thats why so many of our words are pronounced differentley to how they look.

[Quizmonster]

J, the earliest recorded use of the spelling 'tea' is from 1665, though the word was commonly pronounced 'tay' until the mid 18th century...to this day in dialect forms, as I said earlier.
Pope's Rape Of The Lock - which you quote - first saw the light of day in 1712, so the 'old' pronunciation was still going strong then.
The 'tay' pronunciation was brought to Europe by Dutch traders and it is still thus used by their compatriots, as well as the French, Germans, Spanish, Italians, Swedish etc.
I don't doubt the change was part of the Great Vowel Shift, though most of its changes had taken place long before.

[jno]

not so sure about the vowel shift, which I thought was done and dusted by 1600 at the latest in English... as I recall, sea was once pronounced a bit more like say, and changed; but I think tea just mutated independently. I haven't been able to pin down changes in the spelling, so I don't know if it was related to the pronunciation change.

Sorry doomey, getting a bit off topic here, but as a rule, English spellings may reflect old pronunciations, or new ones, or the spellings in the language the words were taken from, or just lousy spelling by the compilers of dictionaries... which is to say, no rule at all really...

[Quizmonster]

J, there are recorded uses of tay, tey, the, tee, thea and tea - as well as frenchified t� and th� - though, from 1680 onwards, 'tea' seems to have become the accepted spelling.
As I said in my final sentence above, the major effects of the Vowel Shift had taken places ages earlier. I was just about prepared to let 'tea' be a last wag of its tail, as it were! You could well be right, however, about the independent mutation.