Say those words out loud and notice where your lips and tongue are when you do it.
The transition between “at morning” is more work than saying “in the morning” because of the way your mouth moves; you have to readjust between the consonants. Similarly, saying “in the night” sounds ok, and is used quite a bit in literature, but is more effort because it’s longer, and “in the night” sort of forces you to pause between “the” and “night” to adjust your mouth
I took a linguistics course where my professor presented his “theory of least effort” which basically states that words and phrases with complicated pronunciations, ones where you have to do more work to say the thing, eventually get morphed due to “laziness” in everyday speaking, basically just a lack of proper annunciation. It explains a lot of linguistic evolution, particularly prior to the printing press.
How on earth is “in the morning” less effort than “at morning”? Doubly so for “afternoon”?
Prepositions in general don’t follow regular patterns in English. I would bet on there being, if any explanation, an etymological one: the origin of morning, afternoon, evening and night are all different, so the constructions which have since been contracted away will have been different.
The sounds IN-TH-MOR progressively close your mouth as you say them. AT-…-MO requires a stop as you convert from open mouth for T and pursed lips for M. AT-NIGHT flows well because mouth and tongue position for the sound for N is almost the same as for the T sound.
The sounds of “in th” can be said without moving any part of the mouth except the tongue, so I have no idea what you mean. Like, you can see them with your teeth touching and holding your lips completely still.
Your argument is completely post hoc to the extent that you’re forgetting whatever you were taught about phonology.
And you’ve skipped the vowel of “the” why, exactly? That’s a whole extra syllable in “in the” compared to “at”, which is definitely not easier. Your analysis is completely based on the difference between “the m”, “the n”, “at m” and “at n” but “at the” is grammatical so what about “at the morning”?
I just telling you why it’s easier, since you olaimed it’s not (with no argument or justification).
In regular speech the vowel in “the” is just rolled through as a transition into the M sound.
If you think the way you say it isn’t easier, then that’s cool, but you might want to consider the difference between fully enunciating each word and how people talk in regular speech.
I have never heard anyone fully elide the first vowel sound in “the morning” -it’s a schwa. The exception is Yorkshire accents which do so, and indeed, that shows you there is more to elide in “in the” than “at”.
“At m” is easier to say simply because it is fewer syllables - inserting more sounds rarely makes things easier to pronounce, and the fact that we say “at midday”, “at most” and “at many times” shows that there is no pressure to change these combinations of sounds.
But the whole thing is based on the faulty, unsupported premise that “in the” and “at” are in free variation. You can’t just start saying “in the midday” because it is ungrammatical, so if there were pressure to simplify “at most” we’d simplify its pronunciation (maybe to “ab most”) not swap preposition.
This is why I’m not giving more of a detailed argument about ease of pronunciation - because it’s not even relevant. That’s not how language picks prepositions. Like why do we say “I’m in the car” but “I’m on the bus”? I don’t know, but I suspect the answer lies in the history of the (Omni)bus, which used to often be open-topped, whereas the (motor)car was generally enclosed since its invention.
To find the answer in the case of morning and night requires tracing the etymology of the words and understanding the grammar used at the time they arose.
Say those words out loud and notice where your lips and tongue are when you do it.
The transition between “at morning” is more work than saying “in the morning” because of the way your mouth moves; you have to readjust between the consonants. Similarly, saying “in the night” sounds ok, and is used quite a bit in literature, but is more effort because it’s longer, and “in the night” sort of forces you to pause between “the” and “night” to adjust your mouth
I took a linguistics course where my professor presented his “theory of least effort” which basically states that words and phrases with complicated pronunciations, ones where you have to do more work to say the thing, eventually get morphed due to “laziness” in everyday speaking, basically just a lack of proper annunciation. It explains a lot of linguistic evolution, particularly prior to the printing press.
At morning is way easier to say.
‘in the evening’
How on earth is “in the morning” less effort than “at morning”? Doubly so for “afternoon”?
Prepositions in general don’t follow regular patterns in English. I would bet on there being, if any explanation, an etymological one: the origin of morning, afternoon, evening and night are all different, so the constructions which have since been contracted away will have been different.
The sounds IN-TH-MOR progressively close your mouth as you say them. AT-…-MO requires a stop as you convert from open mouth for T and pursed lips for M. AT-NIGHT flows well because mouth and tongue position for the sound for N is almost the same as for the T sound.
The sounds of “in th” can be said without moving any part of the mouth except the tongue, so I have no idea what you mean. Like, you can see them with your teeth touching and holding your lips completely still.
Your argument is completely post hoc to the extent that you’re forgetting whatever you were taught about phonology.
And you’ve skipped the vowel of “the” why, exactly? That’s a whole extra syllable in “in the” compared to “at”, which is definitely not easier. Your analysis is completely based on the difference between “the m”, “the n”, “at m” and “at n” but “at the” is grammatical so what about “at the morning”?
I just telling you why it’s easier, since you olaimed it’s not (with no argument or justification).
In regular speech the vowel in “the” is just rolled through as a transition into the M sound.
If you think the way you say it isn’t easier, then that’s cool, but you might want to consider the difference between fully enunciating each word and how people talk in regular speech.
I have never heard anyone fully elide the first vowel sound in “the morning” -it’s a schwa. The exception is Yorkshire accents which do so, and indeed, that shows you there is more to elide in “in the” than “at”.
“At m” is easier to say simply because it is fewer syllables - inserting more sounds rarely makes things easier to pronounce, and the fact that we say “at midday”, “at most” and “at many times” shows that there is no pressure to change these combinations of sounds.
But the whole thing is based on the faulty, unsupported premise that “in the” and “at” are in free variation. You can’t just start saying “in the midday” because it is ungrammatical, so if there were pressure to simplify “at most” we’d simplify its pronunciation (maybe to “ab most”) not swap preposition.
This is why I’m not giving more of a detailed argument about ease of pronunciation - because it’s not even relevant. That’s not how language picks prepositions. Like why do we say “I’m in the car” but “I’m on the bus”? I don’t know, but I suspect the answer lies in the history of the (Omni)bus, which used to often be open-topped, whereas the (motor)car was generally enclosed since its invention.
To find the answer in the case of morning and night requires tracing the etymology of the words and understanding the grammar used at the time they arose.