Indictment is such a funny word, isn't it?

[conuly]

It's the silent c. Why does it even have a silent c? Or, for that matter, a long i? Dictator is pronounced as I'd expect, as is predict, all those other words from dicere. I always want to pronounce the c, and half the time my tongue moves into /k/ position, but I don't think I ever realize it, I just sorta stutter a bit.

But then, it's not a word that comes up often for most of us, is it?

It certainly has come up today, and for a minute I can believe everything is coming up roses. Mirabile dictu!

Comments

[hashiveinu]

It's one of those words that English changed the spelling of to be more like Latin.

"Indite" and "indict" have the same etymology, and I don't know why English changed the spelling of one but not the other.

[conuly]

You do know this entire post is me commenting obliquely about you-know-fuckface without referring to him, because I have a rule here and that rule is NO T-WORD.

[conuly]

That rule, btw, is the only thing that got me through those four awful years. Every time somebody tried to bring up the shitshow of the day, I'd say NO T-WORD! to the general amusement of all. I needed something.

[hashiveinu]

Yes. I thought you might be interested in the answer to the question you posed, though.

Also, My heart is inditing of a good matter.

[conuly]

:D

And I do!

But I wanted to double check that we weren't totally talking at cross-purposes here.

[pauamma]

... wait, the c is silent?

[redbird]

I was amused, last night, to see that the top ten recent look-ups at merriam-webster.com include both 'indict" and "indite."

I learned "indite" from oursin's serial The Comfortable Courtesan, where the narrator talks about inditing letters.

[siderea]

And the i is long (as in "high" and "time".)

[pauamma]

The second one, you mean?

[siderea]

In my dialect (most English speaking dialects?) those words have identical vowel sounds.

[pauamma]

NO, I mean, the 2nd "i" in "indictment"?

[siderea]

Oh, yes, sorry. The second i in indictment is the long one.

[oloriel]

I first came across the word in an seminar on English Religious Prose (of all things) and fortunately it was a classmate who had to read it out (and they already knew how to pronounce it). I would totally have fallen into the trap of saying it, you know, they way it's written because there honestly is no good reason why there should be a long i and silent c.

Which would have been super embarrassing because the prof teaching that seminar got really impatient if you didn't know how to pronounce the more-weirdly-than-usual spelled words. Found that out because that was also where I first encountered jail-spelled-as-gaol. :(

Anyway, finally some good news...

[silveradept]

Someone with more linguistic background than I can probably talk about the presence of silent consonants and what it says about the origins of the word and what societies it may have gone through to get to the current form, because there's a lot of "Germanic words changed to sound more [Z]" and "borrowed wholesale from another language with different vowel and consonant rules" and "borrowed wholesale from another language, but rendered phonetically and then eventually reified."

I have a feeling that there are going to be more lookups for related words to indictment as a particularly high-profile one passes through the public consciousness. Be on the lookout for more armchair lawyers throwing out Latin, perhaps?