Excrescent -t in Amongst and Whilst Part I

Some writers prefer to use amongst and whilst to among and while. I'm not sure what drives this preference (do the -st forms sound more formal to some?), but the -t in these forms doesn't mean anything. The -s on the other hand is our old friend the adverbial genitive.

The -t is what historians of the English language call an excrescent -t. Excrescent means "superfluous outgrowth". A famous example of an excrescent -t is that in the word varmint, which is a dialectal form of vermin with a characteristically southern English lowering of er to ar (seen also in the development of varsity from university, and parson from person) and a final -t that means nothing whatever but is a mere outgrowth from the previous consonant [n].

Excrescent -t tends to develop after n and s. This is because, in forming the sounds [n] and [s], the tongue is already in a convenient position to produce a [t]. This is what's known as an intrusive homorganic plosive. "Homorganic" because the sounds [n] and [t] are produced with the tongue in exactly the same position (on the alveolar ridge just behind the top front teeth); a "plosive" is "a consonant sound made when a complete closure in the vocal tract is suddenly released" (David Crystal, An Encyclopedic Dictionary of Language and Languages). So by the time your tongue is in place to sound an [n], why not do a bit more and sound a [t], too? (The plosive consonants in English are, by the way, [p], [b], [k], [g], [d] and [t]).

Intrusive homorganic plosives are among my favourite phonological phenomena. The word mushroom, for instance, was sometimes spelled (and presumably pronounced) in the 16th and 17th centuries with a final [p], as in the forms moshrump, moushrimpe, mushrompe, and even mushrumpt (two excrescences for the price of one!).

While amongst and whilst exist as variants alongside among and while, against is one example of an excrescent -t that has become entirely standard. I'll write more about it in my next post.