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. 

Don't forget! Sign up for Wordlady Online starting with Hebrew and Yiddish Words in English. More information here:  https://katherinebarber.blogspot.com/2020/04/hebrew-and-yiddish-words-in-english.html

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?

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?

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.

Empty vessels

Some empty vessels (and one that isn't)

Goodness knows why, considering the current political situation, but I came to reflect on the proverbial phrase "empty vessels make the most noise" and got to wondering how long that bit of folk wisdom has been around.

Turns out that people were already onto blowhards in the 1500s:

1547   W. Baldwin A treatise of morall phylosophie contaynyng the sayinges of the wyse   As emptye vesselles make the lowdest sounde: so they that haue leaste wyt, are the greatest babblers. 

1589   R. Greene Menaphon: Camillas alarum to slumbering Euphues   Emptie vessells haue the highest sounds..and pratling gloriosers, the smallest performaunce of courage.

I definitely think it is well past time for the revival of the term "prattling glorioser".

While looking into this, I discovered three other folksy sayings that I was not familiar with:

an empty sack (bag) cannot stand (upright)  [after Italian sacco vuoto non puo star in piedi]: great hunger or need renders a person weak, weary, or desperate.

he could start a fight in an empty room

better are small fish than an empty dish

The "p" in "empty" has not always been there. Back in Old English (when the word could mean "at leisure" or even "unmarried" in addition to its current sense), it was æmetteg. But the middle "e" got squished out of it, leaving "m" and "t" bumped up against one another. In this phonetic situation, a "p" inserted itself to make the transition from one consonant to the other easier. By the 1600s, a new spelling reflecting this, "empty", had ousted the old spelling "emty". 

But I'm pretty sure I don't pronounce the "p" myself, even when speaking very carefully (I don't pronounce it in "temptation" either). Do you pronounce it?

 

Photo by Paul on Unsplash

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

Indict

OK, what's that ridiculous C doing in the word "indict"? Or, conversely, why don't we pronounce it "in DICKT"? Which, come to think of it, might be appropriate. It could mean "to accuse someone of being a dick". (How full our prisons would be!)

But no, it's pronounced "in DITE". And back in the 1300s when we borrowed the word from French, it was sensibly spelled "indite" (sometimes "endite"). The French had done their usual consonant-dropping thing on the Latin original indictāre (to declare), in turn derived from indicere (proclaim, appoint) from in- (towards) + dicere (pronounce, utter).

As with so many other words, the Latinomania of the Renaissance put paid to the sensible spelling: "It had a C in Latin so it should have a C in English!!!!". And there we are.

You may have been puzzled by the apparent use of this word in Handel's beautiful Coronation Anthem, "My heart is inditing", a setting of Psalm 45. This started out as the same word as "indict", but branched out to mean "express in words" rather than "accuse".  The King James Version is

My heart is inditing a good matter: I speak of the things which I have made touching the king: my tongue is the pen of a ready writer.

As this sense is now obsolete, modern translations have

My heart is stirred by a noble theme
    as I recite my verses for the king;
    my tongue is the pen of a skillful writer.

My heart is overflowing with a good thought;
    I am speaking my works for the king;
    my tongue is the pen of a skilled scribe.

https://youtu.be/GZ7cGnucGNU


"Stirred by a noble theme" indeed.

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Looking for an entertaining speaker? Here are some of my topics:

Why is English so wacky?
A fun-filled and light-hearted but informative look at the weirdness of the English language and how it got to be the way it is. Includes things you never suspected about husbands, ptarmigan, porcelain, and much more. Laughs guaranteed...even when you find out why "guarantee" has such an odd spelling.

Bachelor for Rent: Things You Never Suspected About Canadian English”

A hilarious look at what is distinctive about Canadians and their language

English Schminglish: How Jews have Enriched our Language

An entertaining look at how Hebrew and Yiddish words have enriched the English language for thousands of years

More English Masochism

 

Dear faithful Wordlady readers! As you can see, even when I am washing my hands I am thinking of what nifty info about the language I can share with you.

So this week's topic is the plant called chamomile. Or is it camomile? And if the former, what the heck is that silent h doing in there?  You will notice there is no h in the French version.

Like so many names for herbs and other foodstuffs, this is a word we borrowed from French after the Norman Conquest. Old French camomille came from late Latin chamomilla, which came from Greek khamaimēlon (literally "earth apple" from khamai earth + mēlon apple, because of its low-growing habit and the apple-like smell of its flowers). Old French did not believe in inserting unpronounced letters just because they happened to be in the Latin word.

So, in English too, from the 1200s to the 1500s, "camomile" was spelled as it was pronounced. But, as we have seen before, starting in the 1500s English had a mania for inserting silent letters in words to represent Latin etymology. "Camomile", like "debt" and "receipt" and so many other words, was influenced by this trend, but did not completely succumb to it. 

Or not yet. Traditionally, dictionaries will tell you, the United States prefers "chamomile" while everyone else prefers "camomile". However, a survey I did this week of an international group of editors revealed that a whopping 191 opted for "chamomile" versus only 23 for "camomile".  This trend crossed geographical boundaries, and is supported by various corpus searches, which show "camomile" beating a retreat. And this, despite the fact that non-American dictionaries list "camomile" first. Shows you how little influence dictionaries have when the users of the language get the bit in their teeth.

But WHY, when we had the choice between an easier-to-spell, more intuitive variant and a harder-to-spell, less intuitive one, did we have to opt for the latter? I can only conclude that we English speakers really are masochistic when it comes to spelling.

Another question about this word is: How is it pronounced? Does the last syllable sound like "mile" or like "meal"?

Here we have a quite stark North America / Rest of the World divide. My survey revealed the following:

US: Overwhelmingly "meal"
UK, Ireland, Australia: Overwhelmingly, almost exclusively "mile"

This meant, of course, that Canadians had to do their usual thing and be split more or less down the middle, with a slight preference for "mile".

Interestingly, a couple of Texans and a smattering of others had a pronunciation not listed in dictionaries: "mill". 

This pronunciation difference may be a result of the Great Vowel Shift. Before the 1500s, "camomile" (and "mile") were pronounced like modern "meal". Then the shift happened, but perhaps it didn't affect "camomile" as quickly as it affected "mile" and so the earlier version came over to North America. I used to think "camomeel" was an affectation but I should stop being so judgemental.

For just a few of our many other silent letters in English, please see this post:
http://katherinebarber.blogspot.ca/2014/11/silent-letters-in-english-series.html

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.

REMINDER: March 16 "Tea and Wordlady": Bachelor for Rent: Things You Never Suspected About Canadian English. BOOKING UP FAST! More info here: http://katherinebarber.blogspot.ca/2016/02/tea-and-wordlady-wednesday-16-march.html

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