Hi, i’d like to know why some words like mid, among… have at the end “st”?
BTW, Thanks!
I have no idea. I would like to know this too.
Honestly, it’s just another way to say it. I believe it is how those words used to be said always, and they eventually became shortened and lost the ending, just as the word “betwixt” became “between” over time.
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I think this is it. It’s also true that my British friends are far more likely to use the st variations (especially amongst and whilst) than my other native-speaking friends. Personally, as a native speaker (originally from Australia), I never use the st variations.
P.S. My American wife also doesn’t use the st words. And in UN style, they’re forbidden.
Hmmm, what a good question. Even if I could give you a detailed technical answer, I would spare you, because such details might simply be too much. I would say this. There are -st words that can (these days) be interchanged with a words of the same root but without the -st ending, and there are those that cannot. For example, ‘among’ and ‘amongst’ are both prepositions, and I think they are nowadays interchangeable. ‘I sat amongst the roses’, ‘I sat among the roses.’ There’s a slight difference in meaning to my ear, but it’s so slight as to seem to be to be unimportant. ‘Mid’ and ‘midst’ are in a different category, though. ‘Midst’ conveys the sense of being surrounded by or among, and is usually used in the combinations ‘in the midst of …’, ‘in our midst,’, and the like. ‘We have a stranger in our midst’ = ‘There is a stranger among us’. ‘Mid’ means ‘middle’, and is now most often found in combinations such as ‘mid-air’; ‘the planes collided in mid-air’. You can’t interchange them. You can’t say ‘The planes collided in midst air’ or ‘We have a stranger in our mid.’ Others that cannot be interchanged include ‘again’ and ‘against’. ‘While’ and ‘whilst’ confuse a lot of people. They are both often used to mean ‘although’ or ‘by contrast’, and that’s OK these days. ‘At the party, I sang a funny song, whilst my friend told bad jokes.’ However, ‘while’ also means ‘during’, and in this sense you cannot use ‘whilst.’ ‘I sang a song to myself while the kettle was boiling’ indicates that I passed the time waiting for the kettle to boil by singing a song. ‘At the party, I sang a funny song while my friend told bad jokes’ says that I sang my song at the same time as my friend was telling jokes.
Short summary: you have to learn which is which.
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