Quote:
Originally Posted by
Noego 
Out of curiosity, would you be so kind as to explain the difference between those two words?:up:
The following explanation is not mine. It's from airt and aiblins and aglet and aiguille and aiguillette :
Words like affectioned and afferent, even if I don't use them at all, are pretty easy to sound out, but let's pause for a second on affricate. It is interesting that the Collegiate has the term, as does the OED, but the Century does not. That is because the field of modern linguistics was only in its birth at the turn of the century, and the word affricate had not "hardened" into meaning by that time.
The earliest use of affricate (here affricative) as a noun was in 1880 where Sayce said, "Where a spirant or fricative is immediately preceded by an explosive, a double sound or affricative is the result." Ok. An affricate, then, is a "close combination of an explosive consonant or 'stop' with an immediately following fricative or spirant." It really helps a lot that one of the examples Sayce gives of this term is from the Armenian; at least the other is the German "pf." The English example provided in the Collegiate is the "ch" in "choose" being a combination of the "explosive" "t" and the spirant "sh." Hence, the affricate "ch."
All the best. :-D
