[quote turquoise50]@LadyOfTheCanyon Yes the modern pronunciation of forehead and waistcoat obviously make more sense because of their meaning, but in older English (as recently as the early 20th century) it was more common to have a lot of silent letters in words. We see this mostly today in proper names like Leicester, Mainwaring etc, but it used to apply to common words too. But language evolution tends towards simplification, so over time you'll get people looking at a word and thinking 'oh, a coat that stops at the waist, spelled 'waistcoat' - right, that's how I’m going to say it then' and it makes more sense than the 'correct' pronunciation so it sticks.
The spread of it in this case is probably to do with socio-economic changes, because waistcoats were mostly worn by the upper classes, and poorer people were more likely to have been illiterate and never seen the word written down. Once this started to change, so did the pronunciation, but in the pre-recording era it would have taken multiple generations for such a change to become embedded. Not sure why forehead would have gone through the same transformation, but if you listen to older actors in films or tv from 30 or 40 years ago (eg. the cast of Dad's Army) a lot of them say 'forr-ed'. I’m 52 and I remember hearing some people saying it this way when I was a child.
No, sorry, I didn't express myself clearly about back formation. The above is an example of back formation, but mispronouncing foreign words obviously isn't quite the same thing. But there's a similar process which goes on when people have heard a few French words which end in an AY sound and then assume that any French word ending in a vowel must have the same sound. It's a bit 'insert random French noise here'. Then that becomes the accepted pronunciation in the same way that forehead & waistcoat evolved. That's what I meant.
And the logic for Mallorca-Majorca-Madge-orca seems to have operated along the lines of
- ignorance or disbelief that a double L could be pronounced as 'y',
- knowledge that 'j' is pronounced as 'y' in some European languages (because people were used to hearing occasional German words like 'Ja' because of WW2?),
- extrapolation that if J in 'Foreign' was pronounced Y then then this MUST mean that the correct spelling is 'Majorca' (silly Spaniards who don't even know how to spell their own place names! 🙄)
- people then applying English pronunciation rules to that spelling, unaware that if it was a real Spanish word it would have to be pronounced MaHorca (with the gutteral H sound as in 'Jose').
- For good measure, the irony is that some Spanish dialects (mostly in South America) pronounce LL closer to an English J than a Y, so for those speakers, Madge-orca wouldn't be so wildly offbeam, but it still doesn't make Majorca the correct spelling.
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'Not sure why forehead would have gone through the same transformation, but if you listen to older actors in films or tv from 30 or 40 years ago (eg. the cast of Dad's Army) a lot of them say 'forr-ed'.'
Hence the rhyme, by Henry Wansworth Longfellow:
There was a little curl
Who had a little curl,
Right in the middle her forehead.
When she was good,
She was very good indeed,
But when she was bad she was horrid.
Forehead definitely rhymes with horrid here! 