people
6 responses to “eo as in people”
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people
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Why does the “eo” in people say the long sound of /e/ ?
I can’t give you a reference for this (sorry) but I think “people” was spelt “peeple” or “peple” in Middle English, but then those standardising spelling in the 1700s (Samuel Johnson et al) were keen to preserve etymology in spelling, and wanted to link the word “people” to its Latin origin “populus” (the Old English word was “folk”) so added a letter O. The O also links the spelling of “people” to related English words like population, popular and the modern media practice of vox popping (vox populi = voice of the people).
Allison, please delete my previous comment. A tired brian-fade!
Hi Adrian, thanks for the nice feedback about my lists, and don’t worry re brain-fade, I have them all the time. Alison
Hi, I am interested to know if the eo in Geographe as in Geographe Bay WA fits in the list with people. I’ve said it many times over and I can pronounce Geographe with the /o/ as a schwa, but then I can also pronounce it as simply ‘ee’. A student I teach feels it is ‘ee’.
Hi Michelle, I listened to a few people saying ‘Geographe Bay’ on the internet and I definitely heard two vowels not one for the eo, nobody said /jeegraff/, so maybe that’s a local pronunciation. Often people drop unstressed vowels in the middle of words altogether in words they say a lot, as a lot of us do in ‘every’ and ‘family’ and so on. Humans like to cut corners where we can, and there’s no other local place that would be confused with it minus its middle schwa, I guess.