No subject

[Charles C Doyle]

While reading the discussion of the phrase "evil's advocate," I got to thinking of the general possibility that a visual misperception of a word's spelling could effect a change in the word's pronunciation--not just idiosyncratically but among speakers at large.

I fell to wondering about the word "height," as it lost the normal "-th" ending that makes nouns out of adjectives ("width," "truth," etc.)--"heighth" has just too many h's!

It's probably not an example, but I have two observations about the OED entry for "height":

1.  The entry seems not to acknowledge the fact that the pronunciation of the word with a "theta" ending is current--at least in dialects of Southern American English.

2.  The entry notes that the spelling "highth" was "the form used by Milton."  I have no reason to doubt that the spelling represents Milton's pronunciation (as it does my own!), and the OED can't go into all the complexities of such an issue:  But for 16th and 17th century publications, all sorts of vagaries could have occurred between the author's "intent" (or customary oral practice) and what shows up in print.  Besides, Milton was blind; he never saw the text of _Paradise Lost_.  He dictated the lines, and the amanuensis would have handed the ms. pages to who-knows-whom before they arrived at the print shop, where journeyman type-setters, who had varying degrees of skill at deciphering the handwriting, enjoyed some degree of freedom as regards spelling, capitalization, and punctuation.

--Charlie

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