Saturday, November 2, 2013

grammaticality - Was "an unicorn" ever correct?



According to Biblehub and Bible Gateway, King James's Numbers 23:22 says:




God brought them out of Egypt; he hath as it were the strength of an unicorn.





I don't have a hard copy to check. Is that simply a copied typo?


Answer



No, it's not a typo. Words starting with u started with a diphthong until the 18th century. This was part of the Great Vowel Shift. The vowel started changing from /yː/ (its original vowel in French1) in Middle English, migrated through several diphthongs, and ended up at /juː/ sometime around the 18th century.



See Ngram.



1 At least the upper classes, who were descended from French-speaking Normans, used the original French vowel /y/ for French words spelled with 'u' in Early Middle English. I don't know whether there's any evidence for how the lower classes pronounced this.


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