As I mentioned last week, as a result of my CBC interview about Stuart McLean's pronunciations of "schedule" and "raspberry", I've had a number of queries about other pronunciations.
First up: lieutenant and colonel.
LIEUTENANT comes from the two French
words lieu (place) and tenant (holding), because literally a lieutenant is the person who
would be holding his superior's place in the superior's absence.
Now
the question is, why do some people say lootenant and others leftenant?
Lootenant is closer to the Old French pronunciation, but
right from our earliest evidence, in the 1300s and 1400s, we have
spellings that indicate that both pronunciations existed. Probably
the English had a hard time pronouncing French, or they may have
confused lieu with the English word they already knew, "leave"
Or they confused the written "u" with a "v."
For
whatever reason, the "loo-" version died out of British
English but survived in American English, which tends to maintain older pronunciations, for example "herb". Since Americans were
the founders of Canadian English when the Loyalists moved here, we
also inherited "lootenant" But the Canadian Forces have
always been strongly influenced by the British, so leftenant is the
official pronunciation there. When we researched the Canadian Oxford Dictionary, we discovered Canadians split about 50/50 over this pronunciation, with an edge for "lootenant", although people were likely to say "leftenant-governor" even if they otherwise said "lootenant"! Canadian English is not simple! What do YOU say?
COLONEL Why is it pronounced with an "r" even though
there isn't one in the word?! English pronunciation must drive
second-language learners mad!
"Colonel" ultimately
comes from Italian colonello meaning the commander of a
company or "column" of infantry. When the French
borrowed this word, they had a hard time saying "colonel"
with two "l"'s (though they manage to do it now). So the
first "l" got changed to an "r" and they ended up
with coronel, which is what got borrowed into English in
the 1500s and then scrunched down in the pronunciation to ker-nel. But then in the 1600s
people looked at the origin of the word and changed the spelling back
to "colonel" to reflect it, but the pronunciation stuck.
P.S.
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This is great! I've wondered about both of these words.
ReplyDeletemy mother to her dying day put the F in lieutenant. You mentioned the influence of the British on the Canadian armed forces. My mother spent some time in her formative years working at the airport in Dorval (Montreal) working for the airforce there. It must have had an influence on her; perhaps also the fact that her father, a Scottish immigrant, also served in the British army in WWI. i don't recall anyone else that used that pronunciation except actual British folks on TV.
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