Doubling of consonants

Question

The word transfer is confusing me as far as the doubling of consonant before the suffix. “Fer” words have their own set of rules. The rules are clear except that I have NEVER in the US heard the word pronounced with the accent on the second syllable. Yet, in the Merriam Webster dictionary online, it is pronounced with the accent on either syllable and everywhere I’ve looked to find the proper method of adding a suffix shows that the “r” IS DOUBLED before adding the suffix. Is this an exception to English grammar because I have never learned this? Is this new because, being almost 70, I’d better get with the times. Rules are out the door, I guess. Thanking you in advance. Isabel

Answer 1

To my knowledge (note, I am not an expert in historical linguistics, but my PhD advisor is, and I have taken two graduate level courses on the topic), the doubling of the "r" that occurs when going from, for example, "transfer" to "transferring" is a holdover etymological phenomenon from when it was pronounced with second syllable stress. Notably, the standard anglo stress pattern is word initial stress, and a great many words that historically are stressed secondarily have made their way to primary stress at one point or another. For example. the word "nature" used to be pronounced with a clear "t" instead of the "ch" sound, and with stress on the second syllable, but was resyllabified over time after coming into English from French. I agree wholeheartedly that nowadays no one pronounces "transfer" with secondary stress in US English; however, it was almost certainly pronounced that way at one point, and likely for a long time.

The key here is that orthography changes slowly in English, and many words are spelled differently from how they're pronounced because of that. In short, "transferred" is spelled exactly how it's supposed to be given its historical pronunciation, and the issue isn't that it's an exception to English grammar, merely that English orthography is slow to keep up with linguistic evolution.

Answer 2

To my knowledge, this issue has nothing to do with historical linguistics or syllabic rules, but it is simply a matter of following some morphological rule. Usually, when a word ends in this format: CVC (Consonant +vowel+ Consonant), the last consonant, which is "r" in this case, doubled in the participle form (transferring) as well as in the past form (transferred).

I think this is clear.