suffice(d) (it) to say

[Mark Mandel]

I can easily imagine the vowel of "it" in "suffice it to say" becoming
voiceless or (or "and then") elided completely, and the two /t/s
degeminating. Using "!" for barred cap I, and ignoring likely similar
developments in the vowel of "to":
   pronounced as        understood as
   s@ 'faIs !t t@ 'seI  suffice it to say
   s@ 'faist t@ 'seI    sufficed to say
   s@ 'fais t@ 'seI     suffice to say

Of course this is all WAGgery. WAGwork?

Mark Mandel



On Fri, Feb 20, 2009 at 9:27 PM, Gordon, Matthew J.
<GordonMJ at missouri.edu> wrote:
> No, sorry I didn't quote it fully, it was "Sufficed to say, it was the =
> only purchase I made from him."
> Google shows many other examples of this type.
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: American Dialect Society on behalf of Joel S. Berson
> Sent: Fri 2/20/2009 8:22 PM
> To: ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU
> Subject:      Re: suffice(d) (it) to say
> =20
> At 2/20/2009 08:15 PM, Mark Mandel wrote:
>>Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
>>
>>I've always understood this as I've always heard and seen it, "suffice
>>it to say", subjunctive, =3D 'let it suffice  to say ...'.
>
> So, was the "sufficed" in the instance from the blog a verb, past
> tense  --  "[it] sufficed to say"?
>
> Joel

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