Psalm: why the silent P?

Photo by Alabaster Co on Unsplash

My post about the pronunciation of "salmon" (click here) elicited this entertaining story from Wordlady reader Ian Angus:

Your piece reminded me of an experience my family had in the early 1960s.

We had just moved from Vancouver to a rural area about 35 miles south of Ottawa, where much of the population was of Irish Protestant descent.

My sister was in Grade 8 in the local two-room school. Bible readings were still mandatory. One day she came home, with instructions to learn some verses from Sam 23. She diligently searched through the two Books of Samuel, and couldn't find it -- of course it was Psalm 23.

That was when we realized that the local pronunciation of the "al" in many words was a flat "a".  So palm was pam, calm was cam, and so on.

I still live in the area, and that pronunciation has long since disappeared.

I did a survey, and it transpires that this pronunciation is alive and well in Ireland, with even young people using it. There is also some evidence from Scotland. Elsewhere, however, it is dying out. In Canada, we find it, but only rarely, and among older (i.e. 70+) speakers, in areas historically dominated by Irish or Scottish  settlers: in addition to the Ottawa Valley, it is attested in southwestern Ontario, Prince Edward Island, Nova Scotia, the Prairies. It may also be in Newfoundland but I have no information from there, so if any of you do, please let me know.

This is probably a holdover from the earliest pronunciation of "psalm", which was likely to have been S AL M. Over the centuries, the L got swallowed up into the preceding vowel, which gradually shifted to an AH sound in England. The Scots and Irish also dropped the L but their vowel sound didn't shift.

Do you know anyone who says "SAM" or "CAM" for these words? If so, where?

And lo! another silent letter! Where did that initial P come from and why don't we pronounce it?

"Psalm" is derived from post-classical Latin psalmus from ancient Greek psalmos (song sung to the harp), from psallein (to pluck, twitch, twang, play). The word was one of those ecclesiastical words borrowed fairly early into Anglo-Saxon, directly from Latin rather than by way of French as happened after the Norman Conquest. But the initial /ps/ in the pronunciation had already been simplified to /s/ in spoken post-classical Latin, so when the Romance, Germanic, and Celtic languages borrowed it, it was pronounced and written with only an initial s- . 

Because this was a religious word, and Latin was the language of the church, in some languages, spellings (but not pronunciations) with initial ps- were occasionally reintroduced by analogy with written Latin. This trend accelerated with the tendency to Latinized spellings from the Renaissance onwards. Although most European languages resisted the temptation to put a P at the beginning of the word, French, German, Dutch,and (of course) English succumbed. In French, German, and Dutch, the Latinized spelling has resulted in the initial P being now pronounced.  

But in English, as usual, we complicated our lives even more: adding the P but then keeping it silent! When will we ever learn?

How do you pronounce "mauve"?

I was talking to an American friend a few weeks ago, when she uttered the word "mauve". It didn't rhyme with "stove" as it does for me and obviously, therefore, should do for all right-minded people. 

The vowel in her "mauve" was what we would traditionally call a "short o", which you might transcribe variously (depending on your accent) as MAWV or MAHHV or MOV. 

Although I wisely refrained from saying, "How odd that you don't know how to pronounce that. How idiosyncratic!", I have to admit I did think it. Not so fast, Wordlady. A few days later, another American said "mauve" the same way. Curiouser and curiouser.

It turns out that Americans have had this variant short-o pronunciation of "mauve" since sometime in the mid-20th century. In the 1934 second edition of Merriam-Webster's New International Dictionary of English, only MOHV was given. But in the third edition, published in 1961, the short-o pronunciation appeared, listed second (i.e. the less frequent of the two). Since then, though, this pronunciation has taken over as much the more common one in the US. It is now listed first in Merriam-Webster's online dictionary, and is the only one given when you click on the "hear this word pronounced" icon: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/mauve

In a recent survey I did of a group of editors, "short-o" outnumbered "long-o" by a factor of two to one among Americans. (I suppose some of them from the Eastern Seaboard with varieties of English in which "tauter" and "totter" are not homophones may have a third pronunciation, like "MORV" without the R.) One of them even said, "I giggle to think it could rhyme with stove!" Another said, "MOHV is only the pronunciation in French, not in English."

But only Americans have this second pronunciation. Canadians, despite living next door, and being subjected to American home decorating and fashion TV shows, only rhyme it with "stove", and this is also true of the rest of the English-speaking world. The results of my survey with Canadians were a whopping 245 to two in favour of "rhymes with stove". Many Canadians are, like me, stunned to learn that a different pronunciation even exists.

Some commentators, however, complain that the now more common US pronunciation is "wrong", because after all the word came from French (more about that next week) and we should pronounce it as the French do. But Lord knows we have borrowed many French words into English and given them non-French pronunciations. We now say "MARGE ah rin" and not "mar ga REEN" for "margarine", for instance. Whatever the majority of speakers say becomes a standard pronunciation.

(Don't get me started on people who pronounce "brioche" bree-OASH instead of bree-OSH though! Just kidding, but it does bug me in spite of myself.)

Quite frankly, I don't know where short-o "mauve" started out in the US, or why. We borrowed "mauve" into English from French in the mid-19th century, so it is not a case of a pre-colonization pronunciation surviving in the US and being replaced by something else in Britain. (For examples of that phenomenon, see clamber, process, lieutenant, height, primer, herb, ancillary.)

It's not that frequent a word, so it's entirely possible that most people encounter it first in writing, and therefore apply the phonetic rules of their native language to the foreign spelling. But why this phenomenon should have happened for "mauve" only in the US and not in the other English-speaking countries, even those that are less influenced by French than Canada is, is still a mystery. 

The same vowel change has happened with earlier 19th- or 18th-century borrowings:

1. the cooking use of "sauté", more commonly pronounced SAW tay than SO tay in both American and Canadian English, - though not the ballet term, which is only SO tay
2. "vaudeville", by now pronounced almost exclusively VAWD vill

No one, to my knowledge, is suggesting that people should say "SO tay" or "VOH dvill" instead, but one never knows with language cranks.

But this vowel change has not happened (yet?) with more recent borrowings from the 20th century:

1. "haute (cuisine etc.)" (mostly 20th century though some 19th)
2. "fauve" (admittedly a specialist term) 
3. "taupe" (also a fairly specialist term except that it is used a lot as a colour designation for pantyhose)
4. "auteur"(also a specialist term)
5. "chauffeur"

I suspect that within a generation, short-o may be the only pronunciation of "mauve" in US English.

There's a lot more to the story of mauve. What does it have to do with s'mores, for instance? Tune in next week for the continuation. 

And don't forget to tell me: long o or short o, how do YOU pronounce "mauve"?


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The wine guy

Photo by Zachariah Hagy on Unsplash

On the streetcar the other day, I was unavoidably overhearing someone on her cellphone discussing her party planning when I was puzzled by her statement, "So I booked a Somali, eh."

When did East Africans become the latest hip party accessory, I wondered.

Then the penny dropped. 

Oh. 

A SOMMELIER!

MEANING
A sommelier is a wine waiter, one specially trained in the pairing of food and wine. More recently, there are tea sommeliers, beer sommeliers and honey sommeliers. I have even read about water sommeliers, but I hope this concept has died under the weight of its own pretentiousness.

PRONUNCIATION
If you're trying to impress your friends with your highfalutin party plans, I suggest you learn how to pronounce the words properly.

In French, sommelier is pronounced

somm 'll YAY

And I believe that is true for Canadian English as well, though apparently not for my fellow traveller on the streetcar. Some Canadians may stress the first syllable rather than the last.

I was surprised to see that Merriam-Webster lists the only American pronunciation as

suh m'll  YAY

and Oxford UK dictionaries as

somm ELL yay

but the British have a long history of stressing the wrong syllable in words borrowed from French.

How do YOU pronounce "sommelier"?
 
ETYMOLOGY
Back in the Middle Ages, the person in charge of the wine in a great French household was called a bouteiller, literally the guy in charge of the bottles. We merrily borrowed this as with so many French words designating the high life after the Norman Conquest, and it became our word "butler". But while "butler" survived in English, bouteiller did not survive in French.

The word sommelier at this point had been around for a while in French. It started out with the Latin word sagma (a packsaddle). This morphed, by way of saugmarius (a pack animal), into somerier (a driver of pack animals), and then into sommelier (person in charge of the baggage). 

But a sommelier wasn't just any old mule driver cum baggage handler. At about the time bouteiller was dying out, the sommelier was the officer in charge of the baggage when the royal court was travelling. Inevitably every wealthy household wanted a sommelier in charge of their household goods. Wine, as always in France, was considered particularly important, so soon a sommelier was the guy in charge of the wine. We borrowed it from the French in the 19^th century.

I would say that the word has been in English long enough, and has become frequent enough, especially since the 70s, that it does not need to be italicized.

Ancillary

I was just at a ballet symposium in San Francisco, and was brought up short by hearing speakers pronounce "ancillary" as

ANsill airy

I only say (and thought I had only ever heard)

an SILL uh ree


PRONUNCIATION

Once I got over my "These Yanks talk weird" reaction, I thought I'd better check it out. Yes, American dictionaries give 

ANsill airy

whereas British dictionaries and the Canadian Oxford Dictionary give only

an SILL uh ree  

As is so often the case, the American pronunciation is the older one (see also clamber, process, lieutenant, height, primer, herb). It would seem that the British switchover started in the 19th century and was not firmly established till the 20th.

I'm always rather surprised when I find Canadians opting overwhelmingly for a British pronunciation; usually we are split 50/50 or 75/25. If you are Canadian, please let me know how you pronounce this word!

ORIGIN

Where does the word "ancillary" come from? The Latin word ancilla meant "slave girl", and will be recognized by anyone familiar with the Magnificat: 

Quia respexit humilitatem ancillae suae; ecce enim ex hoc beatam me dicent omnes generationes.

For he hath regarded : the lowliness of his handmaiden: For behold, from henceforth : all generations shall call me blessed.

I cannot of course omit to mention that this line was given a particularly beautiful setting by Bach:

https://youtu.be/jJIgNvlobek



MISSPELLING

It appears that many people misspell this word "ancilliary" as if it were like "auxiliary", and as a result (or perhaps the cause of the misspelling) pronounce it

an SILLY airy 
or
an SILL yuh ree

Do not do this. 

MEANING

When "ancillary" was first borrowed from Latin in the 1600s, it meant "additional, but less important than". Some people in the 19th century used it to mean "of or pertaining to a maidservant", but the Oxford English Dictionary (uncharacteristically, it must be said) minces no words about its opinion of THAT:

rare and affected.

Take THAT, Thackeray! 

It acquired a new meaning, 

Providing necessary support to the primary activities or operation of an organization, system, etc.

in the early 20th century, and as you can see, enjoyed a  quite rapid increase in popularity, although now it seems to be waning:

How do you pronounce CLAMBER?

Hey Ma! I clamb the tree!!

Kittens love to clamber up trees (...and curtains). 

But... do they "CLAMburr" or do they "CLAMMER"?

First of all, let us look at the word from which "clamber" derives: "climb". Although the b was pronounced back in Anglo-Saxon times, it started being dropped by the time of the Norman Conquest, and by the 1500s it had become silent. As a result, we even sensibly spelled the word "clime" for about two centuries. But, as usual with English spelling, less sensible heads prevailed, we reinstated the silent b, and we ended up with our modern spelling.

When the past tense of "climb" was "clamb"

"Climb" has not always been the regular verb it is today: 

present: climb

simple past: climbed

past participle: has climbed

Instead, from the earliest times, the past tense was 

clamb, clumb, or clomb

and the past participle

  clumb or clomb

For some people, these forms survived into the 1800s, and according to the OED, in Scottish English this verb is to this day conjugated

 clim, clam, clum

I love it!

Starting in about 1300, though, a new regular past tense and past participle, "clim(b)ed", crept into the language, and was pretty well established by the Renaissance.

How "clamb" gave us "clamber"

But that old irregular past tense "clam(b)" is at the origin of "clamber", a word which cropped up in the 1400s.  By that time, the b was not being pronounced in "climb" (or the past tense "clamb"), so neither was it pronounced in "clamber",  which was in fact more likely to be spelled "clammer" well into the 17th century. 

But just as "climb" got its b back, so too "clamber" acquired a b in its spelling. But unlike "climb", "clamber" also acquired a b in the pronunciation, probably because almost all other English words ending in -mber have a pronounced b. 

Why some North Americans say CLAMMER

This introduction of a b into the pronunciation, however, happened after English colonists took the CLAMMER pronunciation with them to America. In North America, this older, b-less pronunciation of "clamber" survived. This survival of older vocabulary and pronunciation on this side of the pond frequently explains differences between North American and British English.

All the same, according to a survey I did, CLAMMER, though still healthy, especially in the US, is much less common than the b-full pronunciation. Here are the results:

US: CLAMburr: 113  CLAMMER: 46

Canada:  CLAMburr: 83  CLAMMER: 12

No one outside North America said CLAMMER. 

As you can see, although CLAMMER is the minority pronunciation in both countries, CLAMMER is more common in the US than in Canada.  For all that, a Montrealer told me she had never heard anyone saying CLAMburr. (Meanwhile a Vancouverite told me she had never heard CLAMMER!) 

All this has nothing to do with "clamour/clamor", which is a completely different word, borrowed from French in the 1400s and ultimately from Latin clāmōr (a call, shout, cry). As should be evident from the explanation above, people who pronounce "clamber" as a homophone of "clamour" are not simply confusing these very semantically different words. And those who suggest that it's wrong to pronounce it CLAMMER because then it and "clamour" would be homophones are simply ignoring the literally hundreds of homophones we have in English which rarely present an obstacle to understanding (great for punning, though).

When I worked on the entry for "clamber" in the Canadian Oxford Dictionary, a colleague and I were each convinced that the other's pronunciation was WRONG. Or at the very least RIDICULOUS. I said CLAMburr, he said CLAMMER. Both pronunciations ended up in the dictionary, and he and I still talk to one another. (But CLAMburr is listed first, ha!) 

All the same, one of the things you learn (or should learn) when working on a dictionary is that you have to be humble about variants other than your own (and that in fact you might not have even known about previously).  Because CLAMMER is the minority variant, some of my poll respondents who used it apologized for doing so, accusing themselves of "lazy" speech. Others who didn't use it dismissed it out of hand as "a mistake". But as you can see from the above, there are usually legitimate historical reasons for variants such as these. Just look at the fascinating facts about the English language you can unearth if your reaction is "I wonder WHY?" rather than "Well, that's just WRONG because I don't say it that way".

How do YOU pronounce "clamber" (and what variety of English do you speak)?

For the silent b in lamb, click here:
http://katherinebarber.blogspot.ca/2013/05/to-b-or-not-to-b.html

For the silent b in crumb, click here
http://katherinebarber.blogspot.ca/2013/06/crumbs.html


Want to learn more fun facts about the language like this? I'm offering my Rollicking Story of the English Language course again in the New Year! You can sign up for the whole 8-week course or just drop in for the lecture(s) of your choice (so long as you book in advance). More info here:
http://katherinebarber.blogspot.ca/2017/12/rollicking-story-of-english-course.html

Photo credit: Koen Eijkelenboom on Unsplash

One funky plant

We who have gardens that are plunged in shade are ever grateful to the trusty hosta family. But did you know they have not always been called hostas?

Indeed, this plant used to go by the name funkia. I feel it is a pity that this cute word lost out, because I would like to be able to talk about my funkias.

Although the plant is originally from Asia, neither word is of Asian origin. Both are derived from the names of European scientists: "funkia" from H. C. Funck (1771–1839), a Bavarian pharmacist and botanist, and "hosta" from N. T. Host (1761–1834), an Austrian physician and botanist.

I have only ever heard "hosta" pronounced "HOSS ta", but American dictionaries tell me that in the US "HOE sta" is more common. How do you pronounce it?

Another name for the hosta is "plantain lily", because of its similarity to these plantains, which also grow in my garden but make me less happy than my hostas:
 


You would think a plantain is called this because, well, it's a plant. But the origin is a quite different "plant": Latin planta (sole of the) foot. Plantains, as you can see, have broad, flat, prostrate leaves looking not unlike a foot. Well, if you use your imagination.

Another pronunciation surprise awaited me when I looked up "plantain" and discovered that I should not be calling it a "plan TANE" as I have always thought, but a "PLAN t'n". The same holds true for the other "plantain", a starchy type of unsweet banana.

fried plantains

Looking at the Canadian Oxford Dictionary, I see that I wasn't allowing any of this "PLAN t'n" nonsense in it, no matter what all the other dictionaries say. To be so bold, we must have done a survey of Canadians about their pronunciation of this word. How do you pronounce it? (Please don't tell me I was wrong!)


For more gardening-related posts, please click here: 
http://katherinebarber.blogspot.ca/2016/06/gardening-related-wordlady-posts.html


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No bull

If I were to ask you to name a sport or activity that is highly suitable for participation by amateurs, the first thing that would no doubt spring to mind would be...

bullfighting.

No?

And yet, when "aficionado" was first borrowed into English from Spanish just after 1800, "amateur bullfighter" was what it meant. It had had this meaning in Spanish since the mid 1600s, although the Spanish word had been around since the 1400s in a more general sense of "partisan, fan". 

Soon, this more general sense also came into English, and we promptly forgot about amateur bullfighters, no doubt because we have little need to speak of them in the English-speaking world (or maybe because the activity had a built-in obsolescence factor).

ORIGIN

I was caused to investigate this word because this week I heard someone pronounce it "affectionado" (or maybe it was "afictionado"). The former pronunciation in fact has some etymological justification, because the word is derived from the Spanish verb aficionar (to become fond of), which in turn comes from the noun afición, which means, and is derived from the same Latin source as, "affection". 

SPELLING AND PLURAL

There is a spelling issue with this word. It is commonly misspelled "afficionado" (indeed, I often have to look it up myself to double-check), but it has only one F, as in Spanish. The plural is "aficionados".

PRONUNCIATION

This brings us to the thorny question of its pronunciation. I am talking about its pronunciation IN ENGLISH, not in Spanish (even if you're a Spanish speaker). Once a word is borrowed from another language, the adoptive language can have its phonetic way with it. Thus, when we say "manoeuvre" as "muh NOO vur", no one takes it upon themselves to say, "That's not how it's pronounced in French!!! It should be 'man UH vruh'." Likewise, we English speakers have no right to tell Germans that they should stop pronouncing "fan" like "fen".

Having said that, here are the results from an informal Facebook survey I just did. As you can see, the permutations and combinations are almost infinite, but the clear "winner" in Canada is A fish yun AHD oh (that doesn't mean the others are "wrong"). 

My main interest was whether the penultimate syllable sounded like ADD or more like ODD (the way Canadians say "odd", which is like "AHD"). 

It would appear that only Canadians have ever used the "ADD" pronunciation in "aficionado". But it is a trend in Canadian English that we are shifting from the ADD vowel to the ODD vowel in words borrowed from other languages, and this was confirmed by this survey, where only older people (including me) said ADD, and younger people said AHD.  I was, however, surprised to see that the pronunciations with yods ("yun") or even full-fledged syllables ("fishy", "feesee", "fissy" etc.) were more common than the "fishun" option. It is nonetheless likely that the yod-less pronunciation will take over. 

Thank you to everyone who contributed to the survey!

	Canada	US	UK
A-fith-ee-on-AHD-oh	2		1
A-fish-ee-on-AHD oh	2
A fish yun AHD oh	14	3
a-fee-see-on-AH-do	1
A fissy oh nAHD o	1
A fissy uh NAHD oh	1
a FISS yuhn AHD oh	3
A fish un AHD oh	4
a fish ee un AHD oh	2	1
A fee shee on ADD oh	1
A fish yuhn ADD oh	5
A fish un ADD oh	3
a fish ee un ADD oh	4
A fix see o NADD oh	1

 

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Due process

There was a very overblown media brouhaha last week about the health risks involved in eating processed meats.

But there's a much more burning question than "Is bacon going to kill me?", to wit: 

Is "processed" pronounced PROSSessed or PROsessed?"

This is another North America/Rest of the World divide:

British, Australian, New Zealand, and South African English dictionaries: PRO sess
American dictionaries: PROSS ess, PROsess
Canadian Oxford Dictionary: PRO sess, PROSS ess

Is this another example of American pronunciation corrupting the pure unsullied English speech? Quite the contrary. As with so many examples we have seen of North American/British differences, it would seem that "PROSSess" is older and "PROsess" a newer development.

The word has been in the language since the 1300s. John Walker's Critical Pronouncing Dictionary and Expositor of the English Language from 1795 gave only the PROSS pronunciation. Indeed, for the word "progress", subject to the same dual pronunciation, Walker (a prescriptivist whose dictionary's title page famously included the description "Rules to be observed by the Natives of Scotland, Ireland, and London, for avoiding their respective Peculiarities") had this to say: 

"This word is frequently, but improperly, pronounced with the first syllable long, as if written pro-gress. But the analogy of pronunciation evidently tends to shorten the vowel in the inseparable preposition when the accent is upon it, and therefore the nouns produce, progress, project &c. have very properly the o in the first syllable short."

So much for Walker's prescriptions, the English went their merry way saying "PRO-gress" and "PRO-cess", influenced no doubt by free-standing "pro".  PROSSess was still listed as an alternative British pronunciation when the first OED published its entry for the word in 1908, but by 1917 was described as "rare" in Daniel Jones's Pronouncing Dictionary, which finally dropped the pronunciation for its 1989 edition.

But meanwhile on this side of the Atlantic we kept the older pronunciation alive.

Another oddity about the word "process" is how people pronounce its plural. Here in North America, in addition to "PROSS/PROsess iz", some people say "PROSS/PROsess eez". This is a bit of a mystery, the best explanation being that people use the "eez" ending by analogy with words like "analyses" and "theses". Whatever the reason, this pronunciation is common enough to be in major North American dictionaries. 

How do YOU pronounce "process"? And "processes"? Do you have any feelings about the pronunciations that differ from your own?

 

P.S. If you find the English language fascinating, you might enjoy regular updates about English usage and word origins from Wordlady. Receive every new post delivered right to your inbox! If you are not already subscribed, you can either:

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