I blame the parents

One reader of yesterday's post has presented 'canine' as a counterexample to my

The spelling of <consonant> + 'anin' is rare in English, according to my dictionary of choice (the one I have installed, the Macmillan English Dictionary ['MED' in my comments], which allows me to do 'clever' searches), especially where the a is stressed (as in caning, waning and so on); where the a is unstressed there are a few words such as melanin). 

Here's some more detailed reference to my source dictionary. Words of this sort are:

Stressed a:

• canine
• caning
• craning
• planing (and the derivatives 'aquaplaning' and [pardon me!] 'deplaning'; also 'replaning', I suppose, though The MED doesn't mention that explicitly)
• profaning
• waning

Unstressed a:

• melanin
• mezzanine
• pickaninny

Only a handful; I think my 'rare' is justified. MED gives the pronunciation of all the words with stressed a as having the diphthong /eɪ/. When I was young (mid twentieth-century, middle-class, West London) I gave that stressed a in canine an /æ/. Often today I hear (and probably say, such is the power of 'proximal assimilation' - or 'copying people nearby', to give it its less academic title) /eɪ/. I suspect online dictionaries can be found with either {or both} pronunciation{s}. My guess is that in a couple of generations, the /æ/ pronunciation will be confined to a few grey-hairs. But, having just read David Crystal's closing words in The Story of English in 100 Words [and that may be my last quote from that book for a little while, though  not from other Crystal books!] I wouldn't bet on it.

As for Twitter [the word under discussion is Twittersphere] if you had asked me as recently as 2005 whether I thought there was anything interesting about the consonant cluster tw, I would have said 'nothing at all'. If you had suggested that one day it would be the basis for coining hundreds of new words [he has previously mentioned 'twitterhea', 'twitterati', 'twitterholic', 'celebritweet', and many others, listed in full here], I would have said you were mad. Moral: word buffs should never try to predict the future.

 b

Update: 2013.10.02.16:20
Header updated:

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