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FNEEZE

2/5/2020

2 Comments

 
The verb sneeze was first written down sometime in the fifteenth century, but it had a lot of different forms throughout history. Around that same time, the words snese, sneese, scniese,  and sneez were all recorded, among others. Even earlier, in Middle English, it was spelled fnesen, and the story of how that first letter changed is actually quite interesting. Back then, people sometimes used the long s, an archaic way of spelling the letter that looked sort of like an f (ſ), and since fn- words are so infrequent in the English language, people just assumed that spelling was incorrect and changed it to have a long s instead. Fnesen (which still had the same meaning) comes from Old English fneosan and Proto-Germanic fneu, ultimately deriving from the Proto-Indo-European reconstruction pneu, meaning "to breathe".
2 Comments
David V
11/30/2023 03:56:00 pm

Hello,

I have a hard time believing this etymology, to be honest. The average speaker of English in the medieval period was illiterate, so the widespread adoption of sneeze over fneeze as early as the fifteenth century cannot be related to spelling confusions. Do you have a source for this claim?

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penis link
11/11/2024 12:28:57 pm

penis

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