SPELLING PRONUNCIATION

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.

Contents

Examples of English words with common spelling pronunciations

Spelling pronunciations and history

Spelling pronunciation vs. analogical pronunciation

Opinions about spelling pronunciation

Spelling pronunciations in children and foreigners

In other languages

Books

See also

Examples of English words with common spelling pronunciations

★ ''often'', pronounced with , 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

★ ''salmon'', occasionally pronounced with

★ ''falcon'' is now standard; the old pronunciation was 'fawkin' cf. the family name ''Faulkner'' and a long history of variant spellings without -''l''-

★ ''comptroller'', often pronounced with ; accepted pronunciation is "controller" (and in fact the -''mp''- spelling is bogus, 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 instead of (the latter being the closest approximation to the sound in Spanish); similarly ''maraschino'' (cherry) with instead of

★ ''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

★ The pronunciation of ''waistcoat'' as spelled is now more common than the previous pronunciation "weskit"

★ ''conduit'', historically pronounced or , is now nearly always (or 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 in 19th century Britain, by imitation of the current French pronunciation; {{IPA|/treɪt/ is gaining in Britain, though, and was always standard in the USA

★ ''Bartholomew'' formerly pronounced now . (The current standard pronunciation makes hash of the meter of the folk-song ''Bartholomew Fair''.) Similarly ''Anthony'' (< Lat. ''Antonius''), now (in USA)

★ 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 now , ''Papillion'' (Nebraska), formerly now , ''Los Angeles'' formerly now , ''Beatrice'' (Nebraska) formerly and still somewhat currently , now

Spelling pronunciations and history

The purpose of writing is to make a permanent record (of whatever duration) of language, whose normal domain is the speech act, which by its nature vanishes instantaneously. Given the complex organization of human language, the symbols of a writing system might refer to various components of language, most commonly 'words' (as in the numerals ''1, 2, 3'', etc.) or 'sounds.' The latter types are known as phonographic writing systems. ''Syllabaries'' write syllables, i.e. the symbols stand for one or more sounds one of which is always a vowel; the symbols of an ''alphabet'' stand for individual phonemes. (See syllabary, alphabet.)
In phonographic systems, the degree of regularity with which symbols represent sounds is known as 'fit'. The tightest possible fit would be when a given sound is always represented by the same symbol, and a given symbol always represents the same sound and only that sound. This is rarely found in nature. In many languages written phonographically which have a contrast of vowel length, for example, the contrast may well go unrepresented in the orthography (as in Latin) or partially represented (as in Athenian Greek, whose writing system distinguished between long and short mid vowels, but not high and low vowels). In standard German orthography, vowel length is partly not shown at all in writing (''Weg'' "way, road" has a long vowel; ''weg'' "away" has a short one) and partly indicated by inconsistent conventions. In any case, the use of ''alphabetic diacritics'', as in the letter -''h''- used in English orthography in combination with other letters for specific purposes (''th, ch, sh'') is only a mild degradation of fit, since ambiguous cases—ambiguity is the inevitable consequence of suboptimal fit—are rare.
The fit of a phonographic writing system is generally best when the language is first "reduced to writing" (as the telling phrase has it), though even in that Edenic state there will almost always be problems if the writing system was originally developed in connection with writing a different language (as is very often the case; signaries are very rarely invented anew). But there is a strong tendency for phonographic written forms, once they become familiar to their users, to remain unchanged even as the language itself changes. This progressively complicates the fit between symbol and sound as phonological splits, mergers, loss, and so on, go unreflected in the orthography.
The fit of written and spoken English is particularly and famously poor. The explanation is historical, but is more complicated than the brief statement above. 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 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 and , 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 adoped 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, ) 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).
All things considered, it's odd that spelling pronunciations aren't commoner in English than they are. Possibly part of the explanation is that literate speakers of English from an early age get so used to the chaotic fit between orthography and pronunciation, the welter of letters that don't stand for anything, and so on, that they're immunized to a degree against changing pronunciations to match the spelling. But not entirely.

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'').

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.
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".
But it has often been remarked 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 – obviously not the opposite: the true, or original, form of the language is the spoken language (cf. the two meanings of the English word ''tongue'', with equivalents in many other languages: Greek ''glótta'', Latin and Italian ''lingua'', French ''langue'', Spanish ''lengua'', etc.; and there are in the world many millions of analphabets, who nevertheless all speak their native languages, sometimes pretty well). 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, that 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.

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.

In other languages

In French, the first vowel in ''oignon'' (onion) is, anomalously, , where general principles would lead one to expect . 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 (personal experience). (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 /ʃãpuiŋ/; now it's /ʃãpwæ/
In Hebrew there is a vowel called ''patach ganuv'', 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.
In Spanish, the French spelling of "élite" drives speakers to stress the initial "e" although in the original the "i" is stressed (accent marks in French, unlike those in Spanish, don't denote stress).

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.

See also

★ Spelling reform

★ Orthography

★ Folk etymology

★ Mispronunciation