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From: Adam Funk <a24061@ducksburg.com>
Newsgroups: alt.usage.english,sci.lang
Subject: Re: Somewheres
Date: Mon, 02 Sep 2024 16:31:42 +0100
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On 2024-09-02, Peter Moylan wrote:

> Crossposted to sci.lang, where people might know the answer.
>
> Is there a natural tendency for languages to lose final syllables or
> final consonants? This thread has provided examples in Spanish. French
> lost a lot of final consonants (in speech, but not in writing) centuries
> ago. Some southern Italian dialects have dropped a few final vowels, but
> this does not extend to northern dialects or the mainstream version of
> the language. Portuguese seems to drop all sorts of things.
>
> Those are all examples in Romance languages. I can't think of any
> examples in Germanic languages, and I don't know enough about other
> language families.
>
> The well-known example in English is the "dropped g", which reduces an
> -ing ending to -@n. But that's not actually the dropping of a consonant,
> it's the replacement of one consonant by another. The average English
> speaker doesn't notice that, because we're not used to thinking of "ng"
> as a single consonant.

The -ing suffix in Modern English is a fusion of two Old English
suffixes, one similar to German -ung & the other to German -end. I'm
not sure of the extent to which that encouraged the development of the
current -in'/-ing situation.



-- 
With the breakdown of the medieval system, the gods of chaos, lunacy,
and bad taste gained ascendancy.                ---Ignatius J Reilly