“ Ne few” people would rhyme “ Chef, you heard it, has a nephew.” However, the situation is far from clear. Did this outburst of scholarly enthusiasm have a phonetic base? Despite the spelling, most people evidently pronounced nephew with v, so that in “ Bev, you heard it, has a nephew” the italicized words made a perfect rhyme this variant is still the most common one in British English.Īccording to the nearly universal opinion, f in nephew owes its existence to spelling. We are at a loss to explain why scribes replaced v with ph in what eventually became nephew. The same holds for its Greek cognate anepsiós. Nephew is a modern reflex of neveu, which, as can be seen, did not have either f or ph. Nefa continued into the sixteenth century ( neve) and then disappeared. Middle English borrowed Old French neveu, though it could very well do with the native term, as happened in the other Germanic languages. Nepos is the etymon of the corresponding words in the Romance group, including French. Old English had the kin term nefa, a cognate of Latin nepos, which denoted “grandson descendant.” Nefa too exhibited a broad spectrum of senses: “nephew grandson stepson second cousin” (all of them united by the idea “less close than a son”).
#Phew pronunciation full#
The history of nephew, with its puzzling ph, is full of adventures. However, don’t expect logic from English Stephanie is spelled with ph and pronounced accordingly. For example, Anglo-French Estevene became Ste phen (Greek Stephanos), while the shorter form and the family name ( Steve, Stevenson) have v. The emergence of ph, apart from complicating spelling, introduced a good deal of confusion. So turph ‘turf’ and other monsters began to embellish manuscripts and books. The easiest trick was to double consonants (and they doubled like a house on fire), but ph served their purpose too. But the scribes of that epoch inherited from their medieval predecessors the pernicious belief that the more letters one wrote in a word, the more the reader would be impressed. The digraph made sense (I am not saying “was needed” it just made sense) in Greek words like orphan and physician and perhaps in names like Philip. (For more than a century there has been no progress in the movement of spelling reformers, but certain things should be said again and again for the record, even if they fall on deaf ears “one doesn’t always fight to win.”)Īlong with so many other learned spellings, ph appeared in English during the Renaissance. Dictionaries still cite phantasy and fantasy as admissible variants, but hardly anyone feels offended by fantasy, and probably no one is so steeped in classical scholarship as to advocate the spelling phantastic. Several chunks of orthographic fat are crying to be cut off.
This was too radical a measure bushes exist for beating about them. Unfortunately, reformers used to attack words like have and give and presented hav and giv to the irate public. I have written more than once that the only hope to reform English spelling would be by doing it piecemeal, that is, by nibbling away at a comfortable pace.
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