Constant change
up, because you expect to hear than.
If you imagine State Highway 1 in the North Island as a straight line, Kaitaia is at one end and Wellington at the other. In between, we find Hamilton. So Hamilton is between Kaitaia and Wellington. Similarly, if I worked for the university from 1979 to 2014, then I worked for it between 1979 and 2014. But increasingly, people say that I worked for it between 1979 to 2014. That is between … and and from … to are mixed together in a syntactic blend.
Think how you would pronounce tsetse fly, tsunami and Sri Lanka. Not very long ago, there was only one way to pronounce each of these. Tsetse fly was pronounced with an initial tet, tsunami was pronounced with an initial s- sound, and Sri Lanka was pronounced as though written Shri.
The reason is simple: native English words do not allow ts or sr in initial position, so English speakers found ways to avoid these problems. Now, it seems we care less about fundamental English patterns, and we more frequently pronounce these words with initial ts sounds and initial sr. This is driven by the spelling, and also by wanting to pronounce foreign words as they are pronounced in the original language. Yet we still pronounce Paris with a final s- sound (unlike the French) and talk about Venice rather than Venezia.
You may find some of these changes incomprehensible, you may think they are good or bad, they may annoy you, or you may not even have noticed them. It is typical that we do not notice a linguistic change until it is well advanced, by which time it cannot be undone.
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