On 2006-07-17 09:39, Richard Wordingham wrote:
> And that accords well with phrases such as a 'neat idea'! What's the
> likelihood of 'nait' being absorbed by 'neat' when and where they were
> pronounced the same, e.g. Earlyish Modern English in London.
But meanings like 'good, fine' were already part of the semantics of AN
neit, and given the meaning of Lat. niteo 'shine, glitter, be
brilliant', a neat idea was possibly just brilliant.
I wonder if the two adjectives were sufficiently similar to be confused
at any time. In ME the vowel of <net> was probably [e:]; the Great Vowel
Shift made it [i:]. A mid-open variant [E:] (> [e:] by GVS, eventually >
[i:]) may have existed if the modern spelling with <ea> is anything to
go by, but even that would have remained distinct from ME <nait> with
something like [æi], later > [æ:] > [eI]. (A short-vowel variant of
<net> is indicated by the ME spelling <nett(e>, but that's irrelevant
for the question at hand.) One would need a particularly lucky
combination of dialectal developments to make a merger possible (the
converse of the anomaly that has produced the modern pronunciation of
<great>, <break> and <steak>). I would not absolutely exclude early
contamination, though. The Middle English Dictionary includes 'useful'
among the possible meanings of <net(t>, albeit with a question-mark.
Piotr