Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2023 October 11

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October 11

Desiccate

There's a well-established rule that a doubling of a consonant means that the immediately preceding vowel is stressed. Or maybe it's the reverse: if the vowel is stressed, the consonant is doubled. It's probably more nuanced than that, but that's the general gist of it.

So, what's the deal with "desiccate/d"? A newby to the language would try to say it with the stress on the 2nd syllable, de-SIC-ate, but we oldbies know different. It's just another exception to the general rules, and there's nothing exceptional about English exceptions. But we still have to remember to spell it correctly, not as "dessicated". I'm struggling to think of any similar case. Is there one? Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 19:56, 11 October 2023 (UTC)

There's a well-established rule that a vowel letter followed by a double consonant letter represents a "short"/"checked" vowel IF it is stressed, but I'm not sure about the alleged rule that a vowel letter followed by a double consonant letter represents a stressed vowel -- if it's meaningful, it would be much more of a tendency than an absolute. It would apply to many double consonants created by adding an inflectional suffix (e.g. "big", "bigger"), but not always in British spelling (e.g. "worship", "worshipper"). And I'm not sure why "desiccated" is stranger than "necessary" (though a single "s" letter more often represents [z] than [s] in such a context)... AnonMoos (talk) 20:15, 11 October 2023 (UTC)

But then, we have ne-SESS-ity (not NESS-esity, cf. NESS-esary). -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 21:44, 11 October 2023 (UTC)

One thing about desiccate is that the double letter comes from the Latin source of the word: desicco. I'm not sure exactly why it's stressed on the antepenult in English, though. Deor (talk) 22:15, 11 October 2023 (UTC)

The British spelling travelled does not adhere to the rule, while infinity, where the ⟨n⟩ following the stressed and "short" ⟨i⟩ is not doubled, offers a counterexample to the converse rule. A version of the rule that has fewer counterexamples is that a vowel followed by a doubled consonant is generally "short", and in particular does not represent a diphthong. Compare babble and cable, or tinny and tiny. But also this version is not without counterexamples: dessert and desert. This counterexample can be excluded by an addition to the rule: a stressed vowel followed by a doubled consonant is short. But then we have roll, whose ⟨o⟩ is not any shorter than that of role. English spelling being as it is, any rule, whether this one, "I before E, except after C", the three-letter rule, ..., cannot be more than a rule of thumb.  --Lambiam 03:54, 12 October 2023 (UTC)

English spelling has no rules; it only has some guidelines.

Now there is a guideline very common among Germanic languages, and in some of them it actually is a rule, that says that a consonant can be doubled to make the preceding vowel checked (by moving a consonant into the preceding syllable's coda), where that would otherwise not be the case. A checked vowel has a different quality or length than a free vowel. That's why bigger has double g and checked/short i and tiger has single g and free/long i. In English unstressed syllables, there's little if any difference between checked and free vowels, so consonant doubling becomes inconsequential. Practically speaking, English spelling depends more on etymology than on pronunciation. PiusImpavidus (talk) 08:53, 12 October 2023 (UTC)

• Thinking on this after a good night's sleep, I realise there are numerous counter-examples to my thesis, and it's true only with certain qualifications. Thanks for the input. -- Jack of Oz ^{[pleasantries]} 19:11, 14 October 2023 (UTC)

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