[Ads-l] "severity"

[Laurence Horn]

Well, maybe, but I'm not sure.  Severe/severity is an instance of
trisyllabic laxing; cf. "vain"/"vanity", "insane"/"insanity",
"verbose"/"verbosity", "brief"/"brevity".  But we don't have trisyllabic
laxing here, since the tense "(Anti-)Semite" would have
the trisyllabically-laxed counterpart "(Anti-)Se-MIT-ity" and not
"Se-MET-ity", if either of those words actually existed, and the actual
adjective "Semitic" doesn't present the right environment for
trisyllabic laxing anyway.

On Fri, Dec 9, 2022 at 5:16 PM Charles C Doyle <cdoyle at uga.edu> wrote:

> Slightly analogous to the "antisemitic" issue is the change in the
> stressed vowel when "severe" yields "severity."
> Merriam-Webster's Collegiate (10 edition) gives only the [I] pronunciation
> for severe but both [E] and [I] for severity.
>
> --Charlie
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------
> The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org
>

------------------------------------------------------------
The American Dialect Society - http://www.americandialect.org