ABSTRACT
A remark in Oertel’s excellent Lectures on the Study of Language (New York and London 1901, p. 162) makes me think that the following notes may not be altogether superfluous. Oertel endorses Sweet’s suggestion (New English Grammar § 1551) that the n (cr rather η) of nightingale (Old English nihtegale) may be due to associative interference of evening, and he graphically represents the manner in which the speaker’s mind in the middle of the word is suddenly diverted to the final sounds of the word evening, to be, after pronouncing -ing, led back into the normal channel of the word nihtegale. Now I think this process in our case highly improbable. Why should an Englishman think of evening when pronouncing the name of that bird ? Certainly, a Dane does not think of aften in pronouncing nattergal, nor, I fancy, a German of abend in saying nachtigall. The other cases given by Oertel (most of them from Meringer and Mayer) are different, for when a person wavering between abschnitt and absatz, engenders by a momentary confusion the form abschnatt, or when evoid is said instead of “both avoid and evade”, etc.; similarity of meaning and similarity of sound both go together to produce the contamination; but in our case there is absolutely no similarity of sound, and the similarity of meaning, which certainly exists between “evening” and “night”, seems rather thinned out in the case of the bird. Besides, when the form nihtingale arose1), eve(n) was the ordinary form, evening being only used now and then for “the coming on of ‘even’, the process or fact of growing dusk” (NED.); the earliest quotation for evening as a synonym of even is from 1440. We must, therefore, be justified in looking round for another explanation, or, if no explanation is forthcoming, at any rate for parallel instances.
