METATHESIS

Metathesis is the process by which sporadic spoonerisms become the norm due to (often uneducated) speakers of a language getting muddled-up, either dyslexically or due to linguistically inherent tongue-twisters. I remember seeing the word cocodrilo in my neat, bright yellow Spanish vocab book in school and thinking it was a misprint. It wasn't. Crocodile in English is also bastardized in Italian, where the word is coccodrillo. Similar things happen with Classical Latin's MIRACULUM (milagro in Spanish and milagre in Portuguese). The Italians seemed to get it right, though with miràcolo.

One of the most commonly quoted examples of metathesis is the global rendition of the verb ask in lazy, uneducated working-class speech throughout England. The dunce of the Comprehensive class invariably axes a question rather than asks it. And who can blame him, since acsian and ascian were both perfectly acceptable in Anglo-Saxon. It's at times like this one feels so pleased that Britain won the war; by now, a post-Hitlerian régime would surely have had you gassed for making such unacceptably non-aerian statements. Even if, when push came to shove, you were actually more right in a historic kind of way; worse still, we'd probably all be speaking German, enthralling and compulsive as this might have been!

Metathesis is actually an ancient linguistic phenomenon and came into being before universal pronunciation patterns had been established. [l] and [r] are metathesized regularly in many languages, and we can add to the Castilian cocodrilo the Latin word prima > first, furst in Germanic and brennen (German)/ burn (English) as examples in passing. For more on metathesis, check out the attraction to the following syllable of stressed vowels in our section on the development of Castilian phonology.