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What is the letter "i" doing in the word "fruit"?2024 Feb 22
My kid is learning to read and write, and the extra letter "i" in the word "fruit" threw her off. I jumped into explain, and then realized I couldn't. The trusty Online Etymology Dictionary tells us fruit comes from the Latin "fructus" by way of Old French, by which point it's already picked up the "i", but goes no further than this. So why did the "i" in "fruit" linger when so many other French-originating words have their spelling drift? Enter this short Stack Exchange thread, where someone throws a bunch of random words with "ui" into a jumbled question (the words "sluice" and "bruise" do contain the digraph "ui", the words "ruin" and "suicide" (like the word "fruition") clearly do not). The solitary answer doesn't address the word "fruit" – but it does contain a key.
The English digraph "ui" originally represented the "long u" – a sound like the "u" in "university" or "rebuke". But because of gradual phonetic changes in the language, the "long u" sound, when coming after certain consonants, gets reduced to sounding nearly identical to "long oo" as in "loop" or "moon". And so, when an English speaker confronts the French-spelled word "fruit" they are not confused as how to pronounce it. If there were ambiguity, the spelling would likely have drifted over time. But it has not, and so English retains the "i" in "fruit".
I am not a language expert; there's a good chance I'm wrong. But maybe I'm not.
My kid is learning to read and write, and the extra letter "i" in the word "fruit" threw her off. I jumped into explain, and then realized I couldn't. The trusty Online Etymology Dictionary tells us fruit comes from the Latin "fructus" by way of Old French, by which point it's already picked up the "i", but goes no further than this. So why did the "i" in "fruit" linger when so many other French-originating words have their spelling drift? Enter this short Stack Exchange thread, where someone throws a bunch of random words with "ui" into a jumbled question (the words "sluice" and "bruise" do contain the digraph "ui", the words "ruin" and "suicide" (like the word "fruition") clearly do not). The solitary answer doesn't address the word "fruit" – but it does contain a key.
The English digraph "ui" originally represented the "long u" – a sound like the "u" in "university" or "rebuke". But because of gradual phonetic changes in the language, the "long u" sound, when coming after certain consonants, gets reduced to sounding nearly identical to "long oo" as in "loop" or "moon". And so, when an English speaker confronts the French-spelled word "fruit" they are not confused as how to pronounce it. If there were ambiguity, the spelling would likely have drifted over time. But it has not, and so English retains the "i" in "fruit".
I am not a language expert; there's a good chance I'm wrong. But maybe I'm not.