848: aardvark Apr 4, 2017

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Spelling, and pronunciation-rules are nothing more than conventions in order to maintain understandability. This is especially true in English were the sound /a/ in 'father' or 'tot' can be written with an 'a' or an 'o'. It is quite telling then to see a word with that sound spelt with 'aa' in 'aardvark' and one could expect not only would this unlikely be English in origin, but probably wouldn't come from, say, Swedish which uses the character 'å'. The double-a is quite common in certain German orthographies, but more notably perhaps: Dutch. This in fact originates from the Afrikaans—or South African Dutch—words 'aarde' meaning ‘earth’ and 'vark' meaning ‘pig’. Funnily enough, this spelling was kept when it was adopted into English, but now it is spelt 'erdvark' in Afrikaans. English also got the word 'aardwolf' from this same Afrikaans word, but those creatures are more closely related to hyenas than aardvarks.

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