really fun part about reading english poetry is finding words that are meant to rhyme but do not rhyme but actually they do rhyme bc the poet is writing in their accent and not yours. humbling and illuminating.
One of my favorite examples of this is that 19th century poetry consistently rhymed the verb ending -ing with words ending in -in not words ending in -ing, for example, “pursuing” with “ruin”, showing that the pronunciation now written -in’ was in fact the prestige pronunciation, whereas today that’s a stigmatized pronunciation!
Also, an interesting example in Japanese, although not rhyming but syllable count. The modern past tense ending -ta is derived from an earlier -taru, which in turn was derived from -te aru. We find poetry in the Late Old Japanese period which uses the -te aru spelling, but where pronouncing it that way would create a line with too many syllables (poetic forms in Japanese requiring specific numbers of syllables (or more precisely morae) per line), thus showing that they had already reduced -te aru to -taru while preserving the etymological spelling
The -ing one is especially weird
Because the original form (of this sense of the suffix -ing) in Old English was -ende, so a pronunciation like -in is arguably more conservative than -ing, and modern varieties with -in are likely retaining this rather than innovating from -ing
But that means we must have had -ende > -in, but then -ing became the norm (as evidenced by it’s adoption in spelling), so if -in was also the prestige form at that point it must have switched back again, before switching back to -ing again again
See also the dialectical use of “aks” for normative “ask”, where both ascian & axian are attested in Old English, and both seem to have been accepted and there’s been a bit of see-saw-ing
My favorite is a pun from Hamlet where “onion” and “union” are supposed to be pronounced the same, but we don’t do that anymore.
ALT
