Hunef wrote:ILuvEire wrote:Hunef wrote:The interesting question here is why it is spelled -t and not -d.
Etymology. Danish is quite fond of keeping around old spellings.
Yeah, of course it's due to etymology. (Cf. the fact that the Swedish same ending
-t is silent in most dialects, especially the ones Standard Swedish is based on.) But, to be consistent, shouldn't one then spell, e.g.,
fod 'foot' as "
fot" (ON
fót-)?
Etymology isn't the only reason; the second is also history, specifically the time period when spelling was historically regularized.
By the time Danish spelling was standardized, ON
fót probably already sounded like [foˀd], the 't' being softened to 'd', and thus was spelled that way. Danish continued to evolve, though, and so today the word is pronounced [foˀð], the 'd' being softened further to 'dh', but the spelling that reflects the older pronunciation has stayed.
This is one reason I like studying Danish along with the other Scandinavian languages because all of a sudden English doesn't seem so alone, and weird spelling rules begin to make sense. For example:
The spelling of the word 'knee', pronounced [ni:] today, was regularized at a time when it sounded more like Danish 'knæ' [knεˀ]. English didn't stop evolving there, and gradually the 'k' sound was removed, but the spelling was already fixed, and learning new spellings isn't always easy!