Doubled letters - any rules?
November 7th, 2007
I’m trying to find out if there are any productive rules for the appearance of doubled letters in words. Obviously, double e represents the sound /i:/ and double o often represents the sound /u:/. And we all know about doubling of consonants with suffixes when we have CVC at the end of the root word. But what about doubling elsewhere? There seems to be a relationship in many cases between doubling and stress. The doubling appears at the end of the stressed syllable, for example, in words like ‘fallacy, in’telligent, ad’mittance, a’ccommodate, un’missable but what about ‘balance, ‘telephone, di’minish etc. Why no doubling here? Presumably, ‘telephone is because the root of part of the word is tele not telle. So is root more important than sound?
Any ideas anyone?
November 11th, 2007 at 6:31 am
This is certainly a fascinating area of investigation. You may be right about the importance of word origin, and perhaps you should also consider the stress of the original word. Taking balance, for example, the original would presumably not have had the same first-syllable stress: bilancia, so somewhere down the line there was a stress shift in the English pronunciation. [I once had a headmaster who was Mr Ballance, A bit of quick research suggests the origins of that are similar to balance.] Don’t forget that American spelling differs in this area. Eg, traveling. It’s a spelling I prefer, as it avoids the possibility that the word should be pronounced tra’velling!
Are there any words with long vowels followed by double consonants? If so, it would make a mess of the hoping - hopping distinction.
What about flatter and flatulent? (Rarely seen in such close proximity, I guess.) Again, the pronunciation of the root word, flatus, would suggest a reason for the lack of double t in flatulent, which perhaps at one time was pronounced with a long a.
A quick flick through a dictionary brings up various more examples of where a short vowel in a stressed syllable is not followed by double consonant: generous, general, genesis, sabotage, timorous, ebony, eliminate, monopoly, rebel (v), galaxy, senator, chocolate. All of non-English origin.
And who decided that tobacco (from tobaco) should follow the rule and have double c, but not chocolate? Or rattan from rotan?
Sorry to burble on…
November 11th, 2007 at 6:33 am
Seems the italics got lost in the post…
November 11th, 2007 at 12:08 pm
The more I think about, the more I think root is the key - as you say, spelling AND original stress. So perhaps we should teach all language learners of English Greek and Latin first!
November 11th, 2007 at 12:17 pm
Travelling is interesting. In theory, this should not be doubled, because, although it is root ending in CVC + suffix, the stress is on the first syllable. In such cases, we normally do not double cf. ‘offering vs re’ferring. Yet in BrE spelling, we seem to double l whether the stress falls on the vowel before or not – ‘levelling, ‘revelling, re’pelling, com’pelling. In Ame Spelling, l is never doubled, is it?
Re: Italics. You don’t seem to be able to use them in comments - how stupid!