No man is an iland

Photo by Tom Winckels on Unsplash

A Wordlady reader has asked about the silent s in "island".

The s is an interloper.

Way back in Anglo-Saxon, the word was ígland, íland. The first syllable was derived from a word meaning ‘of or pertaining to water’, ‘watery’, and thus an íland was a ‘watery place, land surrounded by water’. Iland came to be the most common spelling in the Middle English period, and indeed survived until the 1600s, appearing in both the King James Bible and Paradise Lost.

But meanwhile the French arrived with their synonymous ile (in Modern French spelled île). Of course being English we decided to keep both the Anglo-Saxon word and the French one.

Ile was derived, with much French squishing, from Latin insula. In the 1400s and 1500s the French had a little flutter with Latinizing spellings and silent letters, so they started to spell it isle. But they smartened up and by the end of the 19th century settled on the modern spelling île, with the circumflex indicating the missing s (which they needn't have reinserted in the first place, but never mind).

Iland, meanwhile, as we have seen, had no historical connection to the Latin insula. But that didn't stop us from messing with the spelling. If ile comes from insula, then iland must too, and we'd better stick a silent s in both of them to show it. 

In the 1500s we started to do that, and by 1700 "island" and "isle" became the only correct spellings.

I suppose we should be grateful that we didn't end up with "insland".

For other words where the silent letter is based on false etymology, see ptarmigan and gyrfalcon. 

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Licorice or Liquorice? ISH or ISS?

Photo by Hello I'm Nik 🎞 on Unsplash

I suspect that, like me, you are feeling a need for comfort food in these tumultuous times.

One of my comfort foods is licorice. Or wait, is it liquorice? And how is that last syllable pronounced?

The word came into English not long after the Norman Conquest, from Old French licoresse. The French had got it from late Latin liquiritia, from Greek glukurrhiza, from glukus ‘sweet’ + rhiza ‘root’.

There were many ways to spell it in the Middle English period (licoriz, licorys, lycorys, lycorice, etc.), but NONE of them had a -qu-. 

The origin of the -qu- spelling is one that avid Wordlady readers must by now be finding predictable, not to say boring. Yes, the Latinizing trends of the Renaissance! It's got a -qu- in Latin so it has to have a -qu- in English!  Actually the -qu- in Latin was probably also a mistake, caused by confusion with liquere (to be liquid). Good thing they didn't look at the Greek and go whole hog and change it to "gliquorice with a silent g" while they were at it!

The "licorice" spelling lingered on in Britain so that even in the mid-17th century Samuel Johnson gave it as the only spelling in his dictionary, although the learned authors he quoted spelled it "liquorice". 

Licorice. n.s. [γλυκύῤῥιζα; liquoricia, Italian; glycyrrhzza, Latin.] A root of sweet taste.

Liquorice hath a papilionaceous flower; the pointal which arises from the empalement becomes a short pod, containing several kidney-shaped seeds; the leaves are placed by parts joined to the mid-rib, and are terminated by an odd lobe. Miller.

By this time, pace Johnson, "liquorice" was definitely the much more common spelling in Britain.
  
But in American English it never supplanted the earlier "licorice", which is also the only spelling given in Noah Webster's 1828 dictionary, although in Webster's 1783 spelling book he recommended "liquorice". The two spellings battled it out in American English throughout the 19th century, but, starting in 1900, "licorice" started its march to decisive victory. In the current Merriam-Webster dictionary, it is the only spelling given.

As usual, Canada straddles the divide between the US and the UK: the Canadian Oxford Dictionary  gives both spellings, with "licorice" being the more common one. Of course, because of our obsession with changing -or- spellings to -our-, there is some evidence from Canada (and other Commonwealth countries) of people attempting a licourice or liquourice spelling. But these are just plain wrong. 

For more on Canadian -our hypercorrection, see these posts:
https://katherinebarber.blogspot.com/2011/07/discouver-vancouver.html
https://katherinebarber.blogspot.com/2018/07/csi-spelling-whats-wrong-with-rigour.html
https://katherinebarber.blogspot.com/2016/06/canadian-hypercorrection.html
https://katherinebarber.blogspot.com/2013/11/stupor-or-stupour.html

Now, what about the pronunciation? Licker-iss or licker-ish? We don't really know how it came about, but the "ish" pronunciation seems to have cropped up in the 1600s. Despite being roundly criticized by usage pundits (and we've seen how effective that isn't), it is now the more common pronunciation in North America. In fact, when we did a survey on this word for the Canadian Oxford Dictionary we could find no Canadians who said "lick(uh)riss".

What do you say, and how do you spell this word?

After all this I now have a craving for lic{qu}orice!

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Dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon

This amazing "video selfie" of a gyrfalcon in Churchill, Manitoba, has received a lot of attention since it was posted by explore.org a few days ago: https://youtu.be/IfV8Vi2o_W0 


Of course my burning question was...

How the heck is "gyrfalcon" pronounced, anyway? And where does this name for the largest member of the falcon family come from?

First, the pronunciation.

"Falcon" itself is not simple. When we researched the Canadian Oxford Dictionary, we discovered that most Canadians pronounce the first syllable exactly the same way as they pronounce "fall" (rhymes with "doll"). Some Canadians pronounce it "fal" (rhymes with "gal"). 

This preference for "rhymes-with-doll" seems to be uniquely Canadian. Here are the pronunciation preferences in some other parts of the English-speaking world:

US:

1) "fal"

2) "rhymes-with-doll"

Australia and New Zealand:

1) "forl"-without-the-"r"

2) "fal"

UK:

1) "forl"-without-the-"r"

2) "rhymes-with-doll"

But there is yet another British pronunciation, with no "l" in it, rather like "forken"-without-the-"r".

Why does this British pronunciation without the "l" exist? Back in the Middle Ages when we got the word from French, it was "faucon" (as it is to this day in French). The origin of this French word was the late Latin falcōn-em, falco, commonly believed to be from falc-, falx (sickle), the name being due to the resemblance of the hooked talons to a reaping hook. But since "l"'s after a vowel tend to get swallowed up and pronounced as a vowel themselves before disappearing entirely (the same thing happened in words like "almond", "calm" and "psalm"), Latin falcōn became French faucon.

But, as we have seen with many other English words, come the Renaissance we refashioned the word to reflect its Latin origins, reinserting the "l" in the spelling even while we still did not pronounce it. By the 19th century, under the influence of literacy, people started to pronounce the "l", but for some it is still silent (exactly as in "almond" and "calm"). 

This history explains why the name of the novelist William Faulkner (whose medieval ancestor would have been the important employee in charge of a noble's hunting hawks) is pronounced "FAWKNER" rather than "FAWLKNER".

How do YOU pronounce "falcon"?

Compared to "falcon", "gyr" is a walk in the park: it is pronounced "jurr" (though really I would never have intuitively guessed that from the spelling).

But where does "gyr" come from?

The ultimate source is the Old High German gîr (vulture) derived from a root *gῑr meaning "greedy". But medieval scholars suggested that it was instead derived from the Latin gȳrāre (circle, gyrate), and refers to the ‘circling’ movements of the bird in the air. Since we had a fondness for classical etymologies even when they were wrong, we ended up reflecting this in the spelling (originally we had spelled it "gerfalcon"). See my post about ptarmigan for another example of this phenomenon.

For the interesting story of another member of the same family, the peregrine falcon, click here.

And here's a piece of ornithological trivia for you: female falcons are larger than male falcons. 

With all this talk of falcons, why not contemplate this beautiful poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins, which gave me the title for this post. It's inspired by a smaller falcon, the windhover or kestrel, but what the heck.

The Windhover

To Christ our Lord

I CAUGHT this morning morning’s minion, king-
dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,	5
As a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of; the mastery of the thing!
Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion	10
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!
No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.

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