The L in salmon

A friend of mine posted this on Facebook:

"You might as well go ahead and pronounce the L in SALMON. Nothing matters anymore"

I had a bit of a chuckle, though as you know I am not judgemental about variant pronunciations.

The real question is, why DON'T we pronounce the L in "salmon"?

The word comes ultimately from the Latin salmon, but we got it by way of French, as we did with so many other food words. The French, as was their wont, had swallowed up the Latin L in their pronunciation, so by the time we English borrowed the word, it was saumon, no L in the spelling and so no L in the pronunciation. It is saumon in French to this day.

But as faithful Wordlady readers know, in English this was doomed to change, thanks to the Renaissance obsession with reflecting Latin origins in English spelling, a phenomenon responsible for many of our silent letters.  By the 17th century, the spelling without an L had died out altogether. Most of us still do pronounce the word SAMMON, but there is some evidence of people saying SALmon (or else the above meme wouldn't exist).

It is exactly the same phenomenon as happened with falcon, palm, almond, and calm.

The influence of literacy, and seeing that L before our eyes, is very strong. In this case, it is reinforced by the pronunciation of "salmonella", which is indeed pronounced -- or supposed to be pronounced -- SAL mon ella. It has nothing to do with fish (unless you eat one that's gone off). The word "salmonella" was coined in French in 1900 to honour the American veterinarian
Daniel Salmon.

How do YOU pronounce "salmon"? With an L or without? 

For more explanations of silent letters in English, go to this post: https://katherinebarber.blogspot.com/2014/11/silent-letters-in-english-series.html
or click on the "silent letters" tag at the bottom of this post.