I have gotten used to British pronunciations in general, with accents on different syllables a commonplace, but somehow "figger" for figure still sounds uneducated to me no matter how many times I have heard it.
Could be. There is a long tradition in English of once people got a little education and saw some spelling they started pronouncing letters that had gone silent in speech, because hey, the letter was right there in the word, so why not pronounce it? So figger could become FIG-your because that "u" was right there, dammit, everyone should say it. The "t" had gone out of often, the first "r" out of library, the first "c" out of arctic, for example. Then they were brought back by the semi-educated.
It gets worse, because a couple of centuries before that there were people who put letters back in that had gone out, because they wanted everyone to know what Latin words they had come from. Doubt and debt. Ridiculous, but that's how people think.
2 comments:
Isn't that one of the rare cases where our British accent is the original? Otherwise why would cowboys say "I figger"?
Could be. There is a long tradition in English of once people got a little education and saw some spelling they started pronouncing letters that had gone silent in speech, because hey, the letter was right there in the word, so why not pronounce it? So figger could become FIG-your because that "u" was right there, dammit, everyone should say it. The "t" had gone out of often, the first "r" out of library, the first "c" out of arctic, for example. Then they were brought back by the semi-educated.
It gets worse, because a couple of centuries before that there were people who put letters back in that had gone out, because they wanted everyone to know what Latin words they had come from. Doubt and debt. Ridiculous, but that's how people think.
I am almost interested enough to look it up
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