How has ask become arks

[onceamai]

AIBU to wonder why those younger than me no longer seem to say the word ask as it is written. How did it become "arks" and so easily adopted into the language?

YANBU - it irritates the hell out of me.

Do people who say "arks" spell it that way, or do they spell it as "ask"?

YADNBU

It's Aks not arks and it is used by the same lazy people (a complete generalisation but usually between about 15 and 25) about who don't bother to pronounce the "th" in think or Thursday (but I've heard lots of adults doing that one). I realise some people have speech impediments before the MN mafia jump on that one! But for the rest it is sheer laziness.

They probably don't spell it at all with all the text speak.

It's part of patois of various of the Afro-Caribbean islands. I used to hear it a lot in the schools I taught in while in London.

I used to hear it a lot as well in South London. Irritates the hell out of me!

It only irritates me when the young-uns use it to try to be cool.

Loved the sound of D the Trinidadian builder and his kids, lovely.

"Prolly"...........

"I can't be arksed"

Which even if it was "I can't be asked" would be wrong because everyone can be asked to do something. Some of us just don't want to do what is asked !

I only ever heard it on the Jerry Springer show, a decade or so ago.

There's an 8 year old girl in our school who says it. I can't work out where she got it from as nobody else in her class says it, and no amount of gentle correction helps. I honestly think she doesn't hear the difference. We live a very very very long way from South London!

patois only exists on a few Caribbean islands and I've not heard arks when I've been in the Caribbean. Just saying not sure why it's necessary to add the colour identifier in front of Caribbean though as there are White Caribbeans and they have the same accents.

YANBU, what I don't get is it sounds awkward, like you have to put in alot of effort to say it. Surely it's easier to just say it properly.

My senior manager would say it. The thing is it completely discredited her in big meetings and made her look like she was thick.

Ooh, it's awful. Heard from a 9 year old Norfolk lass t'other day: "Ah'll prolly meck sure he axed her". Like some kind of 9 year old rural gangster

This spelling, as an attempt to reproduce the pronunciation of the lower classes, is frequently found in Victorian and Edwardian books- so hardly very new. Funny how people always think something they don't like has got to be due to the generation after their own.

The 'f' for 'th' is also old: dh grew up with that, but it can hardly have been a new invention in the 60s.

It's nothing new, it's been said for 40 years to my knowledge and doubtless considerably more.

It was commonly used by the English-born children of West Indian parents when I was a child living in South East London. Probably still is, only the kids who are now using it have parents and grandparents who were born here so the pronounciation and accent it's spoken in will have changed a bit. In my youth these kids had a genuine mix of English and WI accent, nowdays ir's a bastardisation as many of their parents have never even seen the WI. (Nor have I sadly ).

It was picked up by English children and those of other nationalities even all those years ago when I was a child. I can have an exvcellent middle class English accent when I want to but can still drop into the "I can't be aksed", "Come now!" and "Soon come!" expressions picked up from my South London background.

'f' for 'th' was apparently seen as an upper-class marker in the early 1900s. Now I believe it's regionally located.

If you don't grow up hearing the 'f'/'th' difference, it's very hard to learn it retrospectively. (It's essentially a foreign sound to me, and equivalent in difficulty to various sounds in Russian that we don't have.)

Interestingly, something very similar to putting 'innit' at the end of every sentence is recorded in approx 1750 as a country dialect, poss Suffolk.

The 18th century novelist Frances Burney spent a lot of time trying to write different different regional dialects phonetically, so people can read her novels and see how dialects have changed over the years.

What's the technical term for turning the 'sk' of 'ask' into 'ks'? Is there one?

I was wondering the same, Grendel. Also, do we know tht it is a question of turning 'sk' into 'ks'? In Middle English, there are quite a few of these parallel pronunciation pairs, which appear to be dialectal without one necessarily being a corruption of the other (can't think of an example). After all, the concept of Received Pronunciation is a recent one in English.

as a sideline, 'axed' also appears in the Anne of Green Gables books iirc; so also found in 19th/early 20th century Canada.

Oh, you're quite right. 'Axed' is in Anne of Green Gables, ins't it?

Oh, this is a classic.

Looking over the the OED entry, it seems that either 'to ax' is the original, or that 'to ask' and 'to ax' have been two equivalent versions from Middle English onwards.

c. 1000, we have both 'acsian', which looks to me like the forerunner of 'ax', and 'Ic ahsize', which looks like a forerunner of 'ask'

Chaucer has 'I axe'

A sermon of Archbishop Latimer's is recorded as using 'axe', while at much the same time, Shakespeare is using 'ask'.

The spelling to 'axe' seems to be coming up pretty evenly through the 16th centuries, in equally high status texts.

After that, the OED appears to be recording 'axe' as the dialect version and 'ask' as the RP.

May be one of those situations where the US / Canada has kept one 16th century version, perhaps dependent on the immigrants' regional dialect, and the UK RP has moved to a different 16th century version.

And in 20th century Bermuda... I think there it was a Caribbean-influenced phenomenon.

First time I came across arks was when working in Bermuda about 20odd yrs ago.

Reminds me of Futurama where the word ask has been replaced by aks in the english lanuage.

I live in South London and I have rarely met a black person (apologies but I don't know the correct term that doesn't offend anyone) who doesn't say it like this. And they pronounce it arks not aks.

Always found it odd and very annoying.

Well done, Grendel! I thought I had seen that in Chaucer, but was too lazy to get up and axe.

So not a recent invention, not a Caribbean phenomenon, not a lazy degeneration, but a parallel pronunciation which is probably as old as the language and which has been preserved dialectally. Nothing to do with education or status until a more recent age, when dialectal pronuniations (particularly from certain parts of the country) have been given lower status. But no need to think of Archbishop Latimer as lazy or of Chaucer as an uneducated yokel.

I'm finking about this