Whatever happened to ptomaine poisoning?

Photo by Wesual Click on Unsplash

Whenever I write a post about pronunciation, it inevitably sets off a flurry of other pronunciation questions from readers, especially if silent letters are involved.

We have (unfortunately) an almost inexhaustible supply of silent letters in English.

Today's example is the old-fashioned word "ptomaine".  People used to refer to food poisoning as "ptomaine poisoning. The word is pronounced toe main (but keep reading for a surprise about that).

Any of a group of amines [organic compounds derived from ammonia] (e.g. cadaverine, putrescine, neurine) of unpleasant taste and odour, formed in putrefying animal and vegetable matter and formerly thought to cause food poisoning

Cadaverine. 

Putrescine. 

Never say that Wordlady fails to introduce you to lovely words. Anyway, it has been determined that these charmingly named substances are not the actual cause of food poisoning; they just coexist with the toxic bacteria that are. The well-known food poisoning bacteria are Clostridium botulinum, which causes botulism, and salmonella. 

Botulism, though no fun at all, does at least have an entertaining etymology:

Late 19th century from German Botulismus, originally ‘sausage poisoning’, from Latin botulus ‘sausage’, because first identified in badly preserved sausages.

Death by sausage, as it were. And how appropriate that it was Germans who first named it.

"Ptomaine" came into English in the 19th century from the French ptomaïne, from Italian ptomaina, formed irregularly from Greek ptōma ‘corpse’. Goodness this post is getting morbid.

As to the pronunciation, the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, in 1909, gave two possibilities:

toe may ine

or

ptoe may ine

Yes, with a pronounced p. This pronunciation was doomed to failure because English speakers are just not good at initial pt-.

The dictionary even got quite sniffy about the pronunciation that has since become standard:  

‘it is to be regretted that the full correction to ptomatine was not made at its reception into English, which would also have prevented the rise of the illiterate pronunciation toe MAIN, like domain’.

You know, it's unwise to make judgemental remarks about pronunciations you consider "illiterate", because, as we have seen before with words like "balcony" and "camellia",  in a hundred years you'll just look ridiculous.

Well, I'm sorry to inflict a post about food poisoning on you in these times, but at least I am pretty sure you're unlikely to get botulism or salmonella from your chocolate bunny.

Do you use the term "ptomaine poisoning", or have you done so in the past?

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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Psalm: why the silent P?

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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?

Pronounced differences

People are fascinated by pronunciation differences. These can be regional, individual, class-linked, or generational.

If one conducts a pronunciation survey about a given word, people love to give their two cents' worth about how they say the word.

But inevitably, if the word is borrowed from another language, someone will pipe up with 

"The PROPER way to pronounce this word is as in the original [Spanish/French/Greek/Arabic/Swahili/insert foreign language here]"
 
This attitude is...

...how can I put this...

RIDICULOUS.

Do these people really think we should be rummaging around in foreign language dictionaries to see how every word is pronounced in the original language? Most of the words in English are borrowed from another language. Once they get borrowed into English, their pronunciation gets adapted to our phonetic system, and often then carries on its merry way. It may be hard for those of us who speak French to accept "kruh SAWNT" and "bree OASH" and "FOY ur", but what about all the other languages from which English has borrowed which we don't know how to pronounce?

Here's some food for thought. Did you know that the word "balcony", borrowed from Italian balcone in the 1600s, was pronounced "bal COE nee" more or less (but not exactly) like its Italian etymon, until about 1825. But then "BAL kuh nee" ("which", said the 19th century poet and self-appointed language commentator Samuel Rogers, "makes me sick") took over. I defy you to try and reinstate "bal COE nee". And so much for Samuel Rogers' pronunciation pronouncements.

This phenomenon is entirely natural, and happens when English words are borrowed into other languages as well.


Recently a pronunciation survey about the word "coyote" (which was borrowed into English almost two centuries ago) prompted someone to say "The proper way to say this is as in the original Spanish and Nahuatl. It should be co - yo - tay". Nahuatl, by the way, is the language of the Aztecs, in which the cunning canine is a coyotl. Quick, now, how many of you have a pronouncing dictionary of Nahuatl to hand?

If anyone were to say "Roadrunner is the nemesis of Wile E. co yo tay", they would be laughed at. And deservedly so.

If we were to take this approach to pronunciation to its logical conclusion, we would have to say:

I was having a [COOP] of [TAY] with a [chocko LAH tay] [bee SKWEE] (or as some call it, a [COO kyuh]). The [dess AIR] was huge, ten [sahn tee MET ruhs] across, with no nuts because I have an [al airg EE].

This is NOT ENGLISH, and would be incomprehensible.

By the way, that was

I was having a cup of tea with a chocolate biscuit (or as some call it, a cookie). The dessert was huge, ten centimetres across, with no nuts because I have an allergy.

To achieve this feat of pretentious pointlessness, you would have to know the origins of all these words, and how the words are pronounced in their original languages (French, Chinese, Nahuatl via Spanish, French, Dutch, French, French, German).

But we are not speaking those languages. We are speaking ENGLISH.  Why is this concept so hard to understand? The pronunciation of a word is determined by how most people say the word in English. Not infrequently, there is more than one widespread pronunciation. Vive la différence!

For another example of this see "mauve": https://katherinebarber.blogspot.com/2018/07/how-do-you-pronounce-mauve.html

For more on the pronunciation of "coyote", see this post:
https://katherinebarber.blogspot.com/2013/05/wile-e-togony.html 

Photo by London Wood Co. on Unsplash

Miniature

https://youtu.be/zHYlNNV-etQ


I've been enjoying watching The Miniaturist on PBS. 

You might well think that "miniature" has something to do with "minimum" or "minute" (i.e. the "tiny" sense of "minute"). But you would be wrong.

The real story is much more surprising. The word comes from the Latin minium meaning "red lead", a bright red oxide of lead formerly used in artists' paints. In the Middle Ages, the scribes used  this pigment in their illuminated manuscripts,  especially for titles, headings, and initials. 

In Italian, a verb, miniare, was derived from minium,meaning "illustrate a manuscript". A miniatura was an illumination in a manuscript, not just in red, but in any colour. Since these illuminations were of necessity very small, this Italian word, and its English derivative "miniature", came to mean any small picture. Subsequently it came to apply to other small-sized versions of larger things: dogs, marshmallows, chocolates, golf, what have you.

And then it generated the shortened form "mini-".

The title of this TV series is a bit of an anachronism for 17th-century Amsterdam, since "miniaturist" did not enter English till the 19th century, and was not used of dollhouse makers till the 1940s.

Now, what about the pronunciation of those first five letters? 

MINN a?
MINNY a? 
MINN ya?

It was almost certainly "MINNY a" to start with, but in Britain this has been gradually reduced to "MINNa".

In North America, "MINNY a" still exists, alongside "MINNa".

It would seem that in Canada, "MINNY a" and "MINN a" are almost neck and neck, with slightly more people saying "MINNY a". Some respondents reported that they switch between the two, sometimes randomly, sometimes depending on what the miniature thing is.  Others felt they were influenced by knowing how it's pronounced in French. When we researched and edited the Canadian Oxford Dictionary, we put "MINN a" first and "MINNY a" second, but I rather suspect the situation was a similar close-run race to my most recent survey.

In the US, the situation is similar, but with slightly more people opting for "MINN a". This surprises me somewhat as Merriam-Webster lists "MINNY a" first (and the PBS voiceover person calls the show "The MINNY a turist").


I say "MINNAchur". I remember in my youth making fun of the Kraft ads on TV touting their latest vile jellied salad recipe which invariably included "MINNY a chur" marshmallows and what sounded like "Kraft horrible dressings" (it was in fact "pourable dressings"). Fear not, I have outgrown making fun of other people's pronunciations, and I certainly did not make fun of our invaluable pronunciation informants. Still not a fan of jellied salad though.

What do you say?

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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Running the gambit, oops I mean gamut

I recently saw someone using the expression "running the gambit".

This is a mistake; the correct expression is "run the gamut".

GAMUT

But what is a gamut, anyway?

Back in the middle ages, a scale extending from low G of the modern bass clef to the upper E of the modern treble clef included all the notes generally used in medieval music. This low G was what we would call "do" of the scale, but the word "do" didn't exist at the time. "Ut" was the medieval equivalent of our "do". Like the other names of the notes in our modern-day scale, it came from the initial syllable in a line of a hymn for St John the Baptist's day: 

Ut queant laxis 

resonare fibris 

Mira gestorum 

famuli tuorum,  

Solve polluti  

labii reatum, 

Sancte Iohannes

So, to indicate that this low G was the tonic note, it was called "gamma-ut". This got squished together as "gamut" and also came to be used to designate the whole scale. 

(Over time, it became clear that "ut" was not a syllable that lent itself to singing, so the Italians replaced it with "do" in the 1600s. "Si" became "ti" in the 19th century to avoid having two notes starting with S.)

In French, the word for a musical scale is to this day gamme. Our first evidence of the word "scale" (derived from the Italian word scala, a ladder) in this sense comes from the Tudor composer Thomas Morley:

1597   T. Morley A Plaine & Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke 7   Phi. Why then was your Scale deuised of xx notes and no more? Ma. Because that compasse was the reach of most voyces: so that vnder Gam vt the voice seemed as a kinde of humming, and aboue E la a kinde of constrained shrieking.

Constrained shrieking! I love it. (Sorry, sopranos.)
I always laugh when I consult musical entries in the Oxford English Dictionary and come across the title of this book. As one of my colleagues at the Canadian Oxford Dictionary liked to call it: "Thomas Morley's Renaissance Polyphony for Dummies".

Even though it lost out to "scale" in music,  "gamut" survived in an extended figurative sense meaning "the entire range", and people have been "running the gamut" increasingly frequently since the early 19th century.  


GAMBIT
"Gambit", on the other hand, is originally a chess term, designating a sequence of moves, involving a sacrifice to launch an attack or gain some other advantage.

The Oxford English Dictionary has this informative etymology, in which  you can almost see the etymology editor puffing on a pipe reflectively between the two sentences:

Probably a borrowing from Spanish. Or perhaps a borrowing from Italian. 

That non-committal etymology editor does conclude that ultimately the word comes from 14th-century Italian gambetto (a tripping up in wrestling), from gamba (leg). The word came into English in the chess sense in the 1600s, and two hundred years later took on the meaning of a plan, stratagem, or ploy that is calculated to gain an advantage, especially at the outset of a contest, negotiation, etc.

PRONUNCIATION
For many years in my youth, when I was familiar with "run the gamut" only in writing, I pronounced "gamut" as "ga-MUTT". (Have you ever pronounced it this way, or is it just me?) It came as quite a shock when I realized that it is actually pronounced "GAMM utt" and that I was, gasp, wrong.

I still like "ga-MUTT" better, though. Perhaps it would save people from confusing it with "gambit".

Photo credit: JESHOOTS.COM

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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:

Oo! Wales!

I am currently researching a course about varieties of English worldwide, one of these being Welsh English. I had read that a distinctive characteristic of Welsh English speakers is the way they pronounce some words which for the rest of us have an "oo" sound, as in "boot".

First, they pronounce "blew" and "blue" differently, the former having a slight short "i" sound before the "oo" and the latter not.

I felt that my research would not be complete without looking at (oh yeah, and listening to) YouTube videos of the actor Ioan Gruffudd being interviewed. A girl's gotta do what a girl's gotta do. The sacrifices I make for my students.

Imagine how thrilled I was when he spontaneously uttered "blew" in this interview. You can hear it at the 4:53 mark. It (and also his vowel in "withdrew" a bit later) is definitely different than the vowel he uses in "two" and "roommate" later in the clip. https://youtu.be/8tubh_QYZ8E?t=4m6s

Another "oo" word that has a distinctively Welsh pronunciation is "tooth", where Welsh English speakers use the vowel of "book" rather than the vowel of "boot". A particularly grisly scene from the Welsh detective series Hinterland fortuitously delivered up confirmation of this. 

OK, so I may be the only person who watches TV and gets excited like this: "She said tooth!!! He said blew!!!"

Photo by Steve Bittinger on Unsplash

How do you pronounce "grimace"?

 

A friend of mine recently posted on facebook that she was surprised to hear a narrator pronounce the word "grimace" as "grim ACE". 

Several others chimed in that this was clearly wrong.  Everyone knows it's pronounced "GRIM us".

I thought so too, but it's always best to check before making pronunciation pronouncements. Lo! It appears that "GRIM us" is an upstart. A hundred years ago, "grim ACE" was the only pronunciation for this word. 

Before that, when we first borrowed the noun in the 1600s from the French grimace, we pronounced it a la francaise "gree MASS". By the time we turned the noun into a verb in the 1700s, it was being pronounced "gree MACE".

It is not uncommon for the stress in English to migrate from the second syllable to the first, leaving the vowel in the second, unstressed syllable to be reduced to a schwa. This is clearly what happened, though it is hard to say when exactly in the 20th century this came about. 

One thing is for sure, when we surveyed Canadians about their pronunciation of "grimace" for the Canadian Oxford Dictionary, no one said "grim ACE", so we included only the "GRIM us" pronunciation. Other dictionaries, however, give "GRIM us" first and "grim ACE" second.
 
There are two theories as to the ultimate origin of "grimace":

1. Middle French, alteration of grimache, of Germanic origin; akin to Old English grīma mask
2. Spanish grimazo caricature, from grima fright.

How do you pronounce "grimace"? 


I'm offering my Rollicking Story of the English Language course again in the New Year! More info here:
http://katherinebarber.blogspot.ca/2017/12/rollicking-story-of-english-course.html

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