Return of the minimal pairs

[Douglas G Kilday]

Jim Rader (16 Jul 2001) wrote:

>Isn't <britches> for <breeches> standard English as the name for a
>garment?  A pronunciation with [i] in "too big for his breeches"
>would sound non-native to me....

I've never heard [i] in that expression. I suspect that <breeches> became
obsolete in non-rustic dialects of American English, and that "too big for
his britches" was borrowed from a rustic dialect in which [I] was the normal
stem-vowel. The Scottish form is given as <breeks>, and the word is a double
plural (from OE <bre:c>, pl. of <bro:c> 'leg-covering') in which one would
expect [i] in standard ModE, had there been no inter-dialect borrowing.

DGK