I challenge thee!

[nakednatalie]

Ok all you self-styled etymologists out there!

How the hell did the contraction of "will not" become "won't" anyway?

No googling the answer! I could do that myself!

Comments

My educated guess

[bernmarx]

Despite what another poster has said, English is very much logical and rules-based; the rules just aren't necessarily clear to the casual observer.

There are two shifts:

i>o
l>0

The latter is because /lnt#/ violates English phonotactics (as another poster said, it sounds silly) -- it's not impossible to say, but it's not a consonant cluster that English allows. "Shall" follows the same pattern: "I shan't do it."

There are two other ways that lnt# could be brought into line with English phonotactics: /lt#/ or /ln#/. However, "shalt" and "wilt" are already in use, and "shan't" and "won't" have the obvious advantage of preserving the negative. Or we could just have added /lnt#/ to our phonotactic rules, but sound patterns that exist for just a handful of words tend to disappear over time.

The former shift -- i>o -- isn't something I could have spoken to without reading the comments, but it appears from another poster that the shift is actually o>i (that is, "woll" became "will," and "won't" was already fossilized and didn't come along to "win't"). If so, I can't say why "woll" became "will," but "win't" would sound too much like "went," and those are both common.

Re: My educated guess

[nakednatalie]

Cool. I had a feeling if you were still reading, you'd have an explanation. :o)

Re: My educated guess

[bernmarx]

Heh. :) I just like using my Bullwinkle icon.

Re: My educated guess

[bernmarx]

Incidentally, it occurs to me that the i/o alteration in this case might be pretty old, since German also observes it. The infinitive "wollen" ("to want") is "will" in the first person ("Ich will" = "I want").

This is independent from the Great Vowel Shift that students of linguistics and of Western European languages might hear about, where English up and moved the so-called front long vowels (a, e, i), which is why German and Spanish (and to a lesser degree, French) spell their vowels consistently one way and we spell them fairly consistently a different way. (For example, German "katz" ["cat"] sounds like "cots"; French "bête" ["beast"] is "bet," not "beet"; Spanish "micro" ["micro"] is pronounced "MEE-cro.")

(Oh no, you've dropped a quarter in my slot!)