Four-way ablaut in English

[KathTheDragon]

Imo "sploosh" and "splish" are exclusively sound effects, so by your own reasoning they should be excluded.

[alice]

For some reason "blibby" and "blobby" just went through my head, but that's only half way.

[Pabappa]

1.two / twin / twine / twain. twenty is of course also related. There may be another word Im missing somewhere, perhaps before a rounded vowel and with loss of /w/ so not so obvious.

Wouldnt have thought of this if not for this thread.

Found another one thats a bit of a stretch but I like it anyway:

2.town / tine / teen / -ton. tine and teen are simply variants of each other, however.

3. Tangled etymologies give us bid ~ bode ~ bede ~ body and bid ~ bead ~ (for)bade. Separate originally, ... the two bids seemingly merged in Old English, remaining separate in other Germanic languages. So yes, the word "bead" comes from the prayer sense originally. Body could count as two pronunciations if you accept the unstressed "buddy" form as a separate pronunciation (distinct from schwa at least for me). Forbade also has 2 pronunciations.

4. tee ~ tie ~ tow ~ toy ~ tool ~ tug.

[sasasha]

likewise, string/strang/strong/strung works, but i feel even worse about that one, since it again connects much further back than the others and strang is merely a variant of strong.

But also, strength.

[Pabappa]

Yes, of course, thank you. I think at the time I was going for sets showing strict vowel alternation with no suffixes, but then brushed over it when I ran out of ideas and broadened my approach.

Another possible set is water ~ wet ~ otter ~ winter. The third member may rhyme with "water" for most people but Im including it because it is in origin a true ablaut form. "Winter" is only a guess and my first thought is that people in prehistoric Scandinavia in would associate wet weather with spring and summer, not with winter, but etymology doesnt always proceed logically.

[KathTheDragon]

Kroonen calls the connection of PGmc *wintruz with PIE *wed- "unconvincing".

[sasasha]

Yes, of course, thank you. I think at the time I was going for sets showing strict vowel alternation with no suffixes, but then brushed over it when I ran out of ideas and broadened my approach.

Another possible set is water ~ wet ~ otter ~ winter. The third member may rhyme with "water" for most people but Im including it because it is in origin a true ablaut form. "Winter" is only a guess and my first thought is that people in prehistoric Scandinavia in would associate wet weather with spring and summer, not with winter, but etymology doesnt always proceed logically.

Well, if we're doing suffixes, for the strong set you could add strangle for the a-grade, though its connection is further back.

I wanted slit, slat, slot to be a set, but it seems they're not. (Slut could have been folk-etymologied to relate, I guess...) [Edit: I didn't realise, but slut and sleet are purported to relate, "impure liquid" being an intermediary concept which still holds for the Norwegian cognate. Weird. Not sure how far to trust Wiktionary, but that was interesting...]

All of this is taking me back to my undergrad dissertation, which was about acoustic effects in Old English poetry. I was arguing that due to ablaut and borrowings, certain consonant clusters had developed such strong associations with one semantic field that their use in alliterative verse automatically triggered a sort of cascade of connotation (as well as suggesting common chains of formulae). Once a connotation package was set up by a dense network of st- words, for instance, any occurrence of -st- within a rememberable 'trail of influence' would trigger connotative connection and hence some kind of pragmatic influence from that package.

[Pabappa]

Some people say see and say are related, so we could bundle the see/saw/sight/seer set with the say/said set (and "sayer" if that is counted as a distinct vowel). There are probably more, but the connection is speculative already.

But technically also from a vowel, yes? It counts!

A fun almost-example is choose, chose, chosen, choice.

Wiktionary says cast and cost are related to this set, but the -t suffix goes back to PIE. Note, these etymologies are both very tangled and i would consider this an extremely marginal case, ..... the cost here is an obscure and mostly obsolete homonym of the more common sense, and the cast is a variant pronunciation of that which is used mostly in the idiom "cast about".

Also:

bay / bow / bow / buck / bight. All from the root word bow "to bend". The two bows are related yet distinct, not a split pronunciation of a single word. THe etymology for bay on Wiktionary currently does not describe the word as coming from this root, but on bebay it does, so it's possible two unrelated words got smooshed together. Wiktionary also adds bought as an archaic variant of bight, but Im not sure of the pronunciation and it may not have even made it through the loss of -gh.

[Pabappa]

Funnily enough, my next set sounds like it would fit right in with the first. According to Wiktionary,

bite ~ bit ~ bait ~ boat all come from the same Germanic root, *bītaną, going back to PIE *bheyd-.

EtymOnline also gives this etymology, but qualifies it with "perhaps" for the boat entry.

[Pabappa]

heal ~ health ~ whole ~ hale.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

Ah, yes, I've long thought whole probably ought to have been spelled hoal.

[Howl]

bind ~ bindle ~ bend ~ band ~ bond ~ bound ~ bundle (PIE *bʰendʰ 'to bind, to tie')
fly ~ flew ~ flee ~ fled ~ flow ~ flood ~ fowl (PIE *plew 'to fly, to flow, to run')
grow ~ grew ~ grey ~ green ~ grass ~ graze (PIE *greh₁ 'to grow, become green')
live ~ life ~ leave ~ left ~ lave (PIE *leip 'to remain')
seat ~ sit ~ sat ~ set ~ soot ~ nest (PIE *sed 'to sit')

[Pabappa]

a lot like my last one:

quail ~ queal ~ quell ~ qualm. note, though, that the quail here is merely a variant of queal, not the word for the bird. cull is not part of this set, though kill may be.

[Pabappa]

got a big one this time....

grip ~ grab ~ grave ~ grope ~ groove ~ grub ~ gripe . This is conditional on Kluge's Law being valid, which explains why the final consonant is sometimes voiced and sometimes not. Personally I think the evidence leans strongly in favor of it, but even if Kluge's Law is not valid, there are other word sets like this where the final consonant appears sometimes voiced and sometimes voiceless in a word family with closely related meanings. Thus, I think it's quite likely these words are all cognates. I was surprised at gripe being a member, but there seems to be a semantic shift involved.

some other members of this set: graft, groop (sic). wiktionary also says that grove is probably related, and if so, then greave also is, and can add yet another vowel to the set up top.

[Pabappa]

its been a month since i posted here? i thought i posted something about wood and twig last week .... oh well .... i think we all missed a really obvious one here.

did ~ do ~ done ~ deed. for most speakers, also doth, but prescriptivists might say that it should have followed the same sound evolution as does and therefore not contribute a fifth member to the set.

there's a bunch more words that are cognate, like, well, "wood" and "twig", but if we're getting to that level, it's well past the stage where it could conceivably be called ablaut.

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alright, here's a traditional style one:


strike ~ streak ~ stroke ~ strick(en) ~ struck.


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Im just going to keep editing my post so as not to bump it up to the top .... but yes i found another one that we seem to have missed:

bland ~ blend ~ blind ~ blunder, though note that bland is a tangled etymology, half native and half from Latin, that I would say is effectively blended ⁽ᴸᴼᴸꜝꜝꜝꜝꜝꜝꜝꜝꜝꜝꜝꜝꜝꜝ⁾ together now. And blonde is definitely cognate as well, but took a side journey through Frankish into French and then into English. Old English may have retained its inherited cognate of this word long enough to give us the word blondenfeax, which appears to have meant grey-haired rather than blonde but may have contributed to the ready adoption of the French word with the sense change.