Canadians have a remarkable quirk when it comes to spelling and
pronunciation variants: each Canadian believes that his or her
linguistic practice is the "true Canadian" one and anything else must
be wrong -- and probably American to boot. So I have had people who
pronounce "missile" to rhyme with "missal" tell me, outraged, that
those other Canadians who rhyme it with "mile" are obviously wrong and
have sold out to those nefarious Americans. Of course, the truth is
that "missal" is the only pronunciation used by Americans, whereas the
other pronunciation is used by the British.
But Canadians don't
usually like to let the truth interfere with a little zealous
anti-Americanism.
A flurry of controversy which arose in Toronto a while ago about how
to pronounce the word "coyote", prompted by sightings of the
animal in local parks and ravines, is a classic example of this, with the added
fillip of a dash of Western anti-Ontarianism.
Torontonians, whose only
previous acquaintance with the animal was seeing it flattened by a
cartoon anvil, not surprisingly call it a "ky OAT ee". Westerners,
who have lived with the animal longer and traditionally have more
commonly said "KY oat" or even "KY oot", may be prompted to launch
into a spate of righteous indignation about Ontarians' supposed
ignorance, and, worse, their supposed susceptibility to American
influences, whereas Westerners are much more impervious to this and
can keep true Canadianness alive.
Being a Westerner myself, I too say "KY oat", but I like to take a
more dispassionate view. Perhaps we should look into the facts of the
case. Just who does say "KY oat" and who does say "ky OAT ee"? Is
"KY oat" more "truly Canadian" than "ky OAT ee"? (One of my
colleagues at the Canadian Oxford Dictionary admitted to me that he
had always thought that "KY oat" was the "weird pronunciation", and
probably American).
The animal's name is ultimately derived from Nahuatl, the language
spoken by the Aztecs, for whom the crafty canine was a
"coyotl". Reviving this version of the word might solve all our
problems. The fact that it no longer exists can be blamed on the
Spanish speakers of Mexico, who were totally unable to pronounce the
string "tl" at the end of a word and thus transformed it into the
three-syllable "coyote", which is what the English speakers in the
Southwestern United States borrowed from them in the early 1800s.
It
is unclear how the two-syllable variant arose from this, but it is
analogous to what happened to the word "chocolate" as it passed into
English from the Nahuatl "chocolatl" via Spanish "chocolate". The
fact is that for "coyote" all American dictionaries give both
pronunciations, some of them with the "KY oat" version first.
Dear God, this means that BOTH pronunciations are American!! Now what
do we do if we want to be "truly Canadian"??
Well, of course they're
both American. Where else would we get a Mexican Spanish word for a
native animal from? It's hardly likely to have come into Canadian
English via Britain, or to have leapfrogged right over the US to land
in Canada untarnished. We could of course also ask the philosophical
question as to why it would be better if it HAD come from Britain, but
the point is moot.
Now, the coyote does go by other names, such as "prairie wolf" or
"brush wolf", which would avoid the pronunciation problem but incur
the wrath of zoologists who would point out that it is not a wolf.
Perhaps a more uniquely Canadian solution would be to revive the words
"mishagunis" and "togony" adapted by English speakers such as Palliser
from Algonquian names for the animal in the 1800s. Good luck if you
wish to try this.
It is hardly the environmentally correct thing to suggest that we
might enlist the services of a handy roadrunner to ensure that all of
Toronto's coyotes are hoist with their own petard (produced by the Acme
Petard Company, it goes without saying) and thus spare us the necessity
of talking about them at all.
So perhaps we should take the tolerant Canadian view and say
"You say KYoat and I say ky OAT ee; let's call the whole thing ...
legitimate pronunciation variation". Try setting that to a Broadway
tune!
