this post was submitted on 08 Dec 2025
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Like aks instead of ask? The Internet tried hard to convince me, but I'm still not convinced, sorry!
It's called "metathesis". We did it over hundreds of years with 'bird' which was originally 'brid' or 'bridd', and 'wasp' which was originally 'waps', apparently.
In German it's also Wespe, but in my local Austrian dialect it's pronounced Wepsn. Very interesting, I didn't know that shift had happened (or I guess not happened) elsewhere.
I will be using bird and wasps, thank you very much
That's...my point?
I thought "wasp" came from the Norman word "wespe" (French word guespe then later guêpe), but is that not true? Or do we just not know and these are possible explanations but there is no consensus?
So, disclaimer here that I'm not a linguist, I just enjoy learning about linguistics.
OED doesn't have a Norman ancestor for English wasp - it goes back through Old English (wæfs, wæps, wæsp) to Saxon and Middle German/Dutch all the way back to pre-Germanic.
My guess here was that there's a common Proto-Indo-European ancestor and Wiktionary, FWIW, agrees - they provide a reconstructed P.I.E word: *wóbʰseh₂ (“wasp”)
ETA: here's the link to the OED online's etymology page and a screenshot of it if you don't have access through your library.
collapsed inline media
Thanks a lot for the answer! Quite interesting that the Proto-Indo-European word could have been something close to wasp, only for English to go through the waps->wasp that you explained in your previous post.
Well, one fewer false "fact" to believe in, many more to go!
Looks like aks was the original pronunciation
https://youtu.be/dzmmx_v_4fM?t=429
It's incorrect for Academic English but not AAVE, there's more than one version of the language.