Spelling pronunciation
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
A spelling pronunciation is a pronunciation that, instead of reflecting the way the word was pronounced by previous generations of speakers, is a rendering in sound of the word's spelling. Spelling pronunciations compete, often effectively, with the older traditional pronunciation.
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[edit] Examples of English words with common spelling pronunciations
- often, pronounced with /t/, though the pronunciation without it is more prevalent. Older dictionaries don't even list the pronunciation with /t/, though the 2nd edition of the OED does (and the first ed. notes the pronunciation, with the comment that it is prevalent in the south of England and "often used in singing"; see the Dictionary of American Regional English for contemporaneous citations discussing the status of the competing pronunciations)
- clothes was historically pronounced the same way as the verb close ("Whenas in silks my Julia goes/.../The liquefaction of her clothes" --Herrick), but many speakers now insert a /ð/
- salmon, occasionally pronounced with /l/
- falcon is now invariably pronounced with /l/; the old pronunciation was 'fawkin' cf. French faucon and the older English spellings faucon and fawcon. The family name "Faulkner" is still usually pronounced without the l
- comptroller, often pronounced with /mp/; accepted pronunciation is "controller" (the mp spelling is based on the mistaken idea that the word has something to do with comp(u)tare "count, compute"; in fact it comes from contre-roll "file copy", the verb and its agent noun meaning "compare originals and file copies")
- ye the article, pronounced as if spelled with a Y instead of the printers' mark for the letter thorn
- taking the "insular flat-topped g" of northern scripts as a -z- in names like Mackenzie, Menzies, Dalziel (in the last with the value of /y/ originally)
- tortilla and other words from Spanish with the double-L pronounced as /l/ instead of /j/ (the latter being the closest approximation to the sound in Spanish); similarly the Italian sourced maraschino (cherry) with /ʃ/ instead of /sk/
- victuals "vittles" whose -c- (for a consonant lost long before the word was borrowed from French) was reintroduced on etymological grounds, and sometimes pronounced with /kt/
- The pronunciation of waistcoat as spelled is now more common than the previous pronunciation "weskit"
- conduit, historically pronounced /ˈkɒndɪt/ or /ˈkʌndɪt/, is now nearly always /ˈkɒndjuːɪt/ (or /ˈkɑndwɪt/ in the United States)
- medicine, historically pronounced with two syllables but now quite often with three (some speakers use two when they mean medicaments and three when they mean medical knowledge; three syllables is standard in the USA)
- figure originally rhymed with bigger (and still does in the Received Pronunciation); in America the approved pronunciation follows the etymological spelling (copied from Latin figūra)
- trait (traict), has a complicated history: a 15th cent. borrowing from French, it came to be normally pronounced /treɪ/ in 19th century Britain, by imitation of the current French pronunciation; /treɪt/ is gaining in Britain, though, and was always standard in the USA
- Bartholomew formerly pronounced /ˈbartəlmi/ now /barˈθɑləmju/. (The current standard pronunciation makes hash of the meter of the folk-song Bartholomew Fair.) Similarly Anthony (< Lat. Antonius), now (in USA) /ˈænθəni/
- Probably to be included in this general category are the place-names whose traditional ("old fashioned") pronunciations have been displaced by ones influenced by the spelling: St. Louis, formerly /sænt luwi/ now /seɪnt luɪs/, Papillion (Nebraska), formerly /pæpijoʊ/ now /pəpiljən/, Los Angeles formerly /lɔs æŋglɪs/ now /lɑs ændʒələs/, Beatrice (Nebraska) formerly and still somewhat currently /biˈjætrəs/, now /ˈbijətrəs/
[edit] Spelling pronunciations and history
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The fit of written and spoken English is particularly and famously poor. Modern English orthography represents the accumulation of several unrelated writing systems, superimposed one on top of the other. Old English orthography had a very good fit, improved by special symbols to represent sounds not easily symbolized with "Latin values", such as the initial dental consonant of thin, three, and of wool, wolf (using in those two cases letters from runic signaries), and there were some useful adaptations of the Latin alphabet to the needs of representing Old English, such as using the letter y to represent a high front rounded vowel. These orthographic conventions were in many cases ignored by Anglo-Norman scribes, who introduced such preciosities as qu in place of Old English cw, indicated /uː/ with the letters ou as in French, abandoned the runic letters, and fiddled around with diacritics. In at least one case, this was an improvement: Old English had a contrast between /k/ and /tʃ/, but both were written with the same letter: so cén "eager" > English keen, but cinn > English chin. On top of this, from Middle English on, English writers adopted the French practice (unique in Romance languages) of writing words borrowed from Latin with spelling that was, as unchanged from the Latin source as possible, such as with philosophy (compare Italian filosofia) and nation, (compare Italian nazione). And all of these conventions were largely indifferent to ongoing changes in the language. (When nation was borrowed, it had three syllables, /nɑsiˈon/) There was still a spoken contrast between write, right, rite, and wright, which accounts for their spelling; the vowels of meat and meet were still different; knight and gnat still began with a consonant cluster; and so on. These spellings persisted even as changes in the language progressively degraded the fit between the written and spoken forms.
The extraordinarily inconsistent fit between symbol and sound in English has several consequences. Given "silent letters" all over the place, it is easy to introduce letters into words that represent literally nothing at all, not now, not ever, such as the s of island or the w of whole and whore. It is tempting to "restore" (in writing anyhow) letters from earlier states of the language, as when respelling portrait, perfet, det, scism, physionomy as portraict, perfect, debt, schism, physiognomy. You will recognize that the respellings of perfet and physionomy have permanently influenced the pronunciation of the words (though /gn/ in physiognomy is commoner in the US than in Britain); the respelling of scism has given a new pronunciation /skizəm/ a good foothold; the etymologification of debt has been without effect, apart from the headache of remembering the spelling, and portraict failed to make the final cut.
In any case, a literate speaker of English is chiefly bedeviled by the task of having to remember which letters are used to write which sounds in each particular word; there is no method for "doping out" whether a word with the vowel /iː/ should be spelled -ee- or -ea- or even -i- (as in elite and machine) or -e- (as in compete, penal), -ei- (in words of the receive family, and seize, weird) or -ie- (siege, etc.). In most cases our standard spellings are etymological, but by no means all. Whether /ow/ is spelled -oa- or -oCe is largely a matter of chance: road and rode both reflect Old English rád /rād/. But a secondary problem runs the other way: given the general feeling (completely wrong, but general) that writing is primary and language is something evanescent and sloppy that should do its hopeless best to be faithful to the written word, it is unremarkable that from time to time an orthographic form whose fit with the spoken form is poor will be taken seriously by speakers who substitute a kind of guess, based on the letters, for the pronunciation transmitted from speaker to speaker through the generations. The great majority of such guesses are transitory, being soon discarded with reference to the received pronunciation ("mistakes" one might call them). Some however become standard, as in some of the forms mentioned in the section at the beginning of this article.
And while it is true that some such spelling pronunciations have the effect of "reversing history", i.e. restoring (in a sense) sounds lost through regular phonological change, not all do. Many, perhaps most, spelling-based pronunciations of foreign words do no such thing. Pronouncing the -mp- of comptroller, as pointed out above, does no such thing. An interesting example is equip and its derivatives, from French équiper etc. This is a loan word in French, from Low German skippan "to make a ship ready for sea, with provisions, crew, maintenance, etc." The word was borrowed in time for the initial s-cluster in French to become é-; the spelling -qui- is a pure orthographic convention for representing /ki/ (the change of Romance qui, que to /ki, ke/ having provided French scribes—thanks to the persistence of written types in disregard of language change!—with an unambiguous way of writing /k/ before front vowels). That is, there never was a /w/ anywhere in the history of this word, apart from its written representation. Marquess is another example where standard English now has an incorrect /w/.
A more recent example would be the novelty loverly (from My Fair Lady lyrics: "Ah, wouldn't it be loverly"): the spelling is in an r-less dialect, i.e., British English, and is intended to show the "vulgar" pronunciation of the word in three syllables: love-a-ly, or so. And of course there's no "reversal" in pronouncing /θ/ in thesaurus or Anthony (USA) as the 'h' is not etymological.
[edit] Spelling pronunciation vs. analogical pronunciation
In some cases, we cannot tell if a pronunciation is a true spelling pronunciation. The alternative is that a word is being pronounced analogically, in essence as the "sum of its parts". Thus, forehead is commonly pronounced as a sequence of fore plus head, instead of the historically earlier "forrid"; and waistcoat is commonly pronounced as a sequence of waist and coat, instead of the historically earlier "weskit".
Analogy in this sense (also known as recomposition) can be confused with reanalysis. For example, inmost comes from Old English innemest, which contained the ordinary superlative suffix -est. The later switch to in + most was due to reanalysis of -mest as -most (and led to the creation of a whole family of words of relational meaning: northernmost, outermost, uppermost, etc. Foremost is unusual in this group in having much the same history as inmost, being from OE fyremest, superlative of the word giving modern English former).
[edit] Opinions about spelling pronunciation
Spelling pronunciations give rise to varied opinions. Often those who retain the old pronunciation consider the spelling pronunciation to be a mark of ignorance or insecurity. Those who use a spelling pronunciation may not be aware that it is one, and consider the historically authentic version to be slovenly, since it "slurs over" a letter. Conversely, the users of some careless, but not historically deep-rooted, pronunciations such as "Febuary" (for "February") may regard the historically (and phonetically) authentic version as a pedantic spelling pronunciation.
Fowler reports that in his day there was a conscious movement among schoolteachers and others encouraging people to abandon anomalous traditional pronunciations and "speak as you spell".
Others would argue that this trend, though understandable from a socio-psychological point of view, is, from a strictly linguistic perspective, irrational, since writing was invented to represent the sounds of the language and not vice versa. According to this belief, there is no good reason to "speak as one spells", but there are many good reasons to "spell as one speaks", i.e. to reform the orthography of a language whenever it does not render its pronunciation clearly and unambiguously – which is the task of a writing system. How easy such a reform would be in practice is of course quite another matter.
A different variety of spelling pronunciations are phonetic adaptations, i.e. pronunciations of the written form of foreign words within the frame of the phonematic system of the language that accepts them: an example of this process is garage ([ga'ʀa:ʒ] in French) sometimes pronounced as ['gæɹɪʤ] in English. Such adaptations are quite natural, and often preferred by speech-conscious and careful speakers.
[edit] Spelling pronunciations in children and foreigners
Children who read a great deal often produce spelling pronunciations, since they have no way of knowing, other than the spelling, how the rare words they encounter are correctly pronounced. Thoughtful parents usually try to correct such children's errors gently. But as this can never extend to every instance, and there are many words which one reads far more often than one hears, what is a spelling pronunciation in one generation often becomes standard in the next.
Well-read second language learners are likewise vulnerable to producing spelling pronunciations.
[edit] In other languages
In French, the first vowel in oignon (onion) is, anomalously, /o/, where general principles would lead one to expect [wa]. The reason is that the spelling of this word is a hangover from the 17th century, when "i" was invariably inserted before "gn": montagne was spelled "montaigne", but pronounced in the same way as today. However, there are provincial school-teachers who insist on pronouncing oignon with a [wa][citation needed]. (The French Academy has recently (1975) decreed an official change in spelling to ognon.)
When English club was first borrowed into French, the approved pronunciation was /klab/, as being a reasonable approximation of the English. Now the standard is /klyb/ (Littré, though Larousse and Oxford prefer /klœb/), on the basis of the spelling. Similarly, shampooing "product for washing the hair" at the time of borrowing was /ʃɑ̃puiŋ/; now it's /ʃɑ̃pwε̃/
In Hebrew there is a vowel called patach genuvah, consisting of an "a" sign placed underneath a final guttural but pronounced before it: an example is ruach, which looks as if it ought to be *rucha. Where the final consonant is a sounded he (h), many speakers do indeed place the vowel after it, mistakenly pronouncing Eloah (God) as "Eloha" and gavoah (high) as "gavoha". Other examples of spelling pronunciations are the Sephardic "kal" and "tsahorayim": see Sephardic Hebrew language.
[edit] Books
- See the index entries under "spelling pronunciation" from Leonard Bloomfield, Language (originally published 1933; current edition 1984, University of Chicago Press, Chicago; ISBN 81-208-1195-X).
- Most of the etymologies and spelling histories above are taken from the Oxford English Dictionary.
