[Wikipedia-l] Re: An idea

[Mark Williamson]

Technically, the word receipt doesn't have a "p" in it. It's just
spelt that way.

With most such words (knife, knight, know, cough, hiccough), it is for
etymological reasons: people really did pronounce them that way at
some time or another. ("gh" sounding a bit like French "r").

The reason receipt is spelt that way is long, complicated, and frankly
quite boring.

Since everybody is so fond of long, complicated, and boring
explanations, I will elaborate.

"receipt" was, at its point of entrance into the English language
(from Old Norman French), spelt "receite", identical to its spelling
in the language of origin. Unlike most such words (ie, those with
silent letters), it was never actually pronounced with a medial /p/
while it was an English word. The Old Norman word "receite" was
derived from the Mediaeval Latin "recepta", from the Latin-Latin
"receptus", the past participle of "recipere", to take back, to
regain. (essentially that means that "receptus" means "received").
"Recipere" is itself a combination of the prefix "re" meaning back or
again, and "capere", to take.

"re" is a shortened form of "red", which has its origins in
Proto-Indo-European *wret, a metathetical variant of *wert.
(metathetical means some guy who couldn't pronounce the word correctly
changed it by flipping the order of two phonemes, like how some kids
say /p at skEti/ instead of /sp at gEti/ for "spaghetti") *wert means "turn"
(in this sense as in "turned back"), and itself is an extended form of
*wer, meaning to turn or to bend.

"capere" has its origins in Proto-Indo-European *kap-yo, to grasp
something, a suffixed form of *kap, to grasp. *kap-yo is also the
origin of English "heave", which is from the Old English "hebban", to
lift, from the Proto-Germanic *hafyan.

If your daughter asks again why a word is spelt a certain way, you can
ask me and get the truth, which will either make it so she never asks
again why a word is spelt a certain way or make her become interested
in word etymologies.

Mark

On 04/06/05, Jimmy Wales <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> Timwi wrote:
> > And here I am trying very hard to understand how someone can think that
> > a word that is pronounced the way "renowned" is, can possibly have a k
> > in it.  It is not even pronounced anything like "know" or "knowledge".
> > Furthermore, as "gnostic" versus "agnostic" clearly teaches us, letters
> > do not tend to become silent when there is a prefix before them.
> 
> Here is the best way to understand it: English spelling and
> pronunciation are highly irregular.  When a person is "world renowned"
> then they are _known_ around the world.
> 
> Since "know" and "knowledge" have a silent 'k', then adding a prefix
> would not _make_ the k silent, it would merely _leave_ the k silent.
> The fact that "know" and "knowledge" sound different from "renowned"
> isn't really helpful, since they sound different from _each other_, and
> it is quite common for variants of English words to be pronounced
> differently for no apparent reason.
> 
> A German and I once had a very confusing conversation at a restaurant in
> Austria surrounding the word "dough".  A certain item on the menu was a
> piece of meat surrounded by duff, apparently.  Hmm?  What's that?
> Interesting food these Austrians eat.  Unfortunately, when I got the
> meat and ate it it was tuff, and I had to coff.
> 
> My daughter recently asked Danny why the word 'receipt' has a 'p' in it.
>  Well, he gave a decent answer but I think he made it up out of thin air.
> That's the best that most of us can do, even very well educated and
> smart people.
> 
> --Jimbo
> 
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