They don't rhyme?
A recent Visual Thesaurus Word of the Day email indicated that "remonstrate" and "demonstrate" were rhymes. A more recent one said:
The rupt that you see in bankrupt proceeds from the same ultimate source as the one you see in disrupt and interrupt, though it's easy to overlook the similarity because of pronunciation differences. Latin rumpere, "break," lurks in the background.So this time when I looked them up, there was no support for the claim - not even a "sometimes" entry lurking in the background. There's some stuff going on with the "bank-" part, and the stress is shifted, but still ... "pronunciation differences" strong enough that you wouldn't associate the "-rupt" of these three words?
What's up with the guys at Visual Thesaurus? Where do they come from, that they don't rhyme these words?
2 Comments:
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At 5:43 PM, February 28, 2011
Anonymous had this to say...
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At 6:39 PM, February 28, 2011
The Ridger, FCD had this to say...
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<-- Older Post ^ Home Newer Post -->They don't rhyme them because rhyme in English consists of 3 things: (1) identical vowel sound; (2) identical stress; (3) identical terminal consonant sound, if any. Bankrupt is stressed on the first syllable; disrupt and interrupt are stressed on the last syllable. The paragraph you quote from the website doesn't say they rhyme anyway, so whom are you supposed to be disagreeing with?
Gosh, you're right.
Of course, my title is a play on a previous post's title, so I'm not changing it.
And my point was not that they "rhyme" but that the -rupt is pronounced exactly the same in all three words, so what is this "pronunciation difference" that makes it "easy to overlook" that it's the same root?
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