pnictogen-wing

The Pnictogen Wing

@pnictogen-wing

  • they/them

plural system in Seattle, WA (b. 1974)
lots of fictives from lots of media, some horses, some dragons, I dunno. the Pnictogen Wing is poorly mapped.

host: Mx. Kris Dreemurr (they/them)

chief messenger and usual front: Mx. Chara or Χαρά (they/them)

other members:
Mx. Frisk, historian (they/them)
Monophylos Fortikos, unicorn (he/him)
Kel the Purple, smol derg (xe/xem)
Pim the Dragon, Kel's sister (she/her)

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pnictogen-wing
@pnictogen-wing
exerian
@exerian
jaidamack
@jaidamack

So I found out a neat language thing!

It turns out that 'vixen' is kind of an aberration in English. The v sound should have shifted alongside 'fox' when Middle English decided to mix things up - you know, because it's English and fuck you understanding anybody in the village twenty miles up the track. It just... didn't.

Funny thing is, up north you'd have people saying vox and vixen, whereas down south fox would change... and vixen didn't. You can see this in German with 'fuchs' and 'füchsin,' but in English? Nah! For no good reason that anybody can determine!

Which means. A WLW fox couple could technically be fixen for a vixen.

AAAAYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY

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in reply to @jaidamack's post:

VeraLycaon
@VeraLycaon

You have the opposite situation in Dutch - 'vos' and 'vossin', with both historic F sounds voiced into Vs. As for why English isn't consistent about it when all the other West Germanic languages are... no idea, other than it just being a result of a bunch of different dialects being smooshed together into the standard one(s) over time.

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Enfaeutchie
@Enfaeutchie

Vox and vixen down south (specifically south-west, Cornish and West Country English) and fox and fixen everywhere else. This is cause south-west dialects (and Yola!) did a change f, s -> v, z, which survived into at least the 20th century but might be dead now afaik. So vixen was borrowed from south-west English and brought into varieties that used f for everything. Same thing happened to produce vat and vane apparently (in non-SW dialects fat and fane)

This is taken as pretty vital historical evidence that English is an aspiration language (like German or Mandarin) rather than a voicing language (like French or Dutch, ish), but that's a whole different and more abstract kettle of fish

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0x10f
@0x10f

It's funny how the Finnish words from the same origin as vat and vane also start with "v". (Finnish didn't have the "f" sound yet when it loaned the words from Swedish.)

Finnish vati 'dish, bowl' < Swedish fat < Old Norse fat < Proto-Germanic fatą
English vat < Old English fæt < Proto-West Germanic fat < Proto-Germanic fatą

Finnish vänrikki '2nd lieutenant' < Swedish fänrik < German Fähnrich < Fahne < Middle High German van(e) < Old High German fano < Proto-West Germanic fanō
English vane < Middle English vane < Old English fana < Proto-West Germanic fanō

(Sorry, can't type asterisks in front of reconstructed words.)

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