This has bothered me for years and pops into my head here and there. Whenever I see the word triple my brain says it like the word “tripe” (the stomach of a cow that people eat)
Am I missing some rule that is used when it comes to spelling? Why is it Nipple and not Niple
Why no Tripple?
In: 5590
Because “Triple” is a Latin loan word via French. It is spelt iple
Nipple is Germanic in origin, and a double consonant signifies a stressed short vowel
TLDR: English spelling is a hodgepodge of 3-4ish writing conventions that have gotten too comfortable together
One of the reasons has to do with pronunciation. believe it or not, spellings sometimes were meant to help guide pronunciation. Triple is a French loan word and was spelled the same way in French. In English, a consonant is often doubled to avoid mispronouncing the preceding vowel (in this case the i ) as a long sound, in other words “Try-pull”. But this was a French word which back in the day most English speakers would have recognized or been influenced by, and would have been pronounced something like “treep-luh” . It’s also spelled the same in Latin and again, the pronunciation of a latin loan word would have been more well known back then (and is pretty close to how we say it now). But I agree with you, tripple would be more clear but we tend not to correct the spellings of foreign loan wards as much. Look at “rendezvous”. Also many spellings got frozen as another commenter said, due to the printing press.
Nipple was earlier ‘nyppell’ and before that ‘neble’. B and P get mixed up so Neble turned into neple. As to why they doubled both the P and the L, IDK but as before the tendency in English is to double up consonants with short vowel sounds like the i in nipple to avoid saying “NYE-pull”
Ha, ha, ha! Rules? English spelling is so random. There are very few rules that work all the time, and the rest are just suggestions.
Why is triple pronounced triple but trifle pronounced trifle?
In Norwegian, it’s “trippel”.
I thought Dutch, too, since that’s how Belgian triple-style ales are labeled. But no, says Google Translate.
I think your issue is you are assuming language and spelling is logical like maths. It’s not. Ita kinda logical if you know a huge amount of a language’s etymology, but thats not really the same lol.
First of all, I can tell you why the i sound in ‘triple’ and ‘tripe’ don’t sound the same.
Generally, the final, silent e will jump back ONE consonant to make the previous vowel make a long sound. So ‘tripe’ ‘fire’ ‘time’ sound different to trip, fir and Tim.
If there are 2 or more consonants between the vowel and the final silent e, it won’t make the vowel long. An example of this is ‘triple’.
Of course there are always exceptions to rules in English, because it’s three languages in a trenchcoat.
As for why it doesn’t have the double P like nipple, I really don’t know, but some words ending in -ple are like that, some aren’t. Example, sample, trample, simple, pimple.
Because english is not a language
It’s actually three languages in a trenchcoat switching positions with every syllable
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