Safe as hice

Some nice hice in San Francisco.

Photo by Cosmic Timetraveler on Unsplash

Plurals seem to be the flavour of the month, with readers asking why many moose aren't meese, and this leads inevitably to the question, "If the plural of mouse is mice, why isn't the plural of house ... hice?"

"Mouse" was mus in Anglo-Saxon. Way back, when the Anglo-Saxons first arrived in England, its plural was musiz (pronounced moo-seez). Just as with "goose", the sound in the second syllable affected the first syllable (the phenomenon called "i-mutation"). Whereas gosiz became ges, musiz became mys (pronounced "meese"). With the Great Vowel Shift, this became the "mice" that we know today.

The Anglo-Saxon ancestor of "house" (hus), however, belonged to a category of noun, like the ancestor of "deer", where the form was the same in the singular and the plural. One hus, two hus. So there were no husiz to precipitate the i-mutation that would have led eventually to a plural "hice". 

Two house, two housen, two houses?
The unchanged plural "house" (one house, two house) actually survived into the 14th century, but it was ultimately defeated by two other possibilities. One was an irregular plural "housen", which still survives in some dialects.  Inevitably, though, the strength of the regular "add (e)s to make the plural" pattern in English gathered "house" to its ample bosom and "houses" was the ultimate winner.

But, just to make life difficult for ESL learners, we added a subtle pronunciation change to the plural. Whereas the "s" in "house" is pronounced with a hissing "SS" sound, without the vocal cords vibrating, that same "s" in "houses" is pronounced like a "z", with the vocal cords vibrating. (If you put your hand on your throat and hiss a "ss" followed by a "zz" you can feel the difference).

This phenomenon is caused by the fact that the consonant is between two vowels, and to utter a vowel, you HAVE to vibrate your vocal cords, so it's easier to keep vibrating them for the consonant in the middle as well.  This voicing of consonants between vowels (intervocalic consonants) has existed in English since the earliest times.

T becomes D, F becomes V, S becomes ...
We North Americans voice our intervocalic t's (e.g. "tutor" sounds like "Tudor"), and English has many words where an unvoiced "f" becomes a voiced "v" in the plural where the "e" following the "f" used to be pronounced: wife/wives, half/halves, leaf/leaves, life/lives, loaf/loaves, and so on.  With those, at least we indicate the change in sound by the spelling. But  "houses" is the only example in standard English of a plural where a voiceless intervocalic s becomes voiced. Think of words like "buses", "asses", "cases", "bases", "cabooses" (no, the plural is not "cabeese"!) and so on.

HOUZes or HOUSSes?
Being the sole example of a pronunciation phenomenon in the language is not good for phonetic job security. Inevitably the predominant regular pattern will start influencing the irregular one. And indeed, a reader from Michigan informs me that her children (in their fifties) pronounce "houses" with a voiceless ss sound, that is, "HOUSSez", although she herself says "HOUZes". I conducted a poll of my facebook friends, and of 73 who responded, only one, from Ohio, said "HOUSSez". Nonetheless, Merriam-Webster dictionaries include both pronunciations for the plural, and there is chatter on the Internet about the voiceless version (complaining about it, naturally). I cannot for the life of me understand why people get so upset about slight pronunciation differences. 

How do YOU pronounce "houses"?

For more information about mouse-related words (not to mention some titillating pictures), see this post: http://katherinebarber.blogspot.ca/2012/08/of-mice-and-men.html

For some more examples of voiced intervocalic consonants, see these posts:

Congratulations, Women's Hockey Team! (Now, how do I say that?)

Off with their heads!

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Of Garters and Gardens

Sorry to disappoint the more salacious-minded of you, but this post will not be providing images of women's upper thighs bedecked with lacy undergarments.

We will in fact be dwelling on titillating images like this one:

and asking the question, "Why are they called garter snakes?" 

For they are indeed "garter snakes", not "garden snakes" as their name is often corrupted. This corruption (I use this word in its dispassionate linguistic sense of "change from the original") is a result of folk etymology -- because they do indeed turn up in gardens -- reinforced by the North American phonetic tendency which makes us pronounce "garter" as "garder". Be that as it may, "garter snake" is the correct term.

It is perhaps not surprising that people associate snakes more with gardens than with garters, because our mental concept of what a garter is has changed quite a bit since this family of non-venomous North American snakes acquired its name in the 1700s. Back then, garters did not look like this  (that would be a pretty bizarre snake):

but often more like the two garters (one 16th-century Italian, the other 18th-century American) at the top of this post.  They had evolved from the basic woven garters of the Middle Ages, which probably looked something like this:

You can immediately see why a European coming on a snake like this in his North American travels, and just possibly fantasizing about undergarments at the time, would be inspired to call it a "garter snake". The one below looks particularly as if someone had woven it a nice garter-like suit.



The word "garter" came into English, like many garment-related words (including "garment" itself) from French after the Norman Conquest. In Old French the garet (modern French jarret) was the back of the knee (something for which we don't have a word in English). This was where garters were usually fastened. The word ultimately derives from the word for "leg" in the Celtic language of the pre-Roman inhabitants of Gaul.

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Congratulations, Women's Hockey Team! (Now, how do I say that?)

A while ago I ran a survey asking people how they pronounced "congratulate/congratulations". With many medal-winners deserving to hear those words these days, it seems an appropriate time to look at the results. 

The question was:

Do you say 

con GRATCH

or

con GRADGE

(some people insisted they said con GRAT you, but frankly I don't believe them, unless perhaps they were having to sing the word in a church choir).

The Canadian speakers' results were:

GRATCH: 42
GRADGE: 18
The GRADGE group tended to be under the age of 40.

Americans:

GRATCH: 8
GRADGE: 7

British:

GRATCH: 6
GRADGE: 0

So, GRADGE is clearly a North American phenomenon.  American and Canadian dictionaries give both pronunciations, with GRATCH first. But not so long ago, the Merriam-Webster's Third New International Dictionary (1961), which is remarkably non-judgemental in its pronunciations, felt the need to say that "GRADGE" was "chiefly in sub-standard speech", and I have certainly heard it criticized. This "language maven", for instance, calls it an "informal and sloppy" "beastly mispronunciation"  (conveniently not addressing the question why the -tion in "pronunciation" is not equally "sloppy"...)

But, as is so often the case in language change, a phenomenon originally considered "sub-standard" becomes the norm. It seems to me when I watch American TV shows, the only version I hear is GRADGE (people are always congradgalating someone on The Good Wife, for instance).

The question is: why has GRATCH become GRADGE?  Phonetically what is happening is that the voiceless consonant "tch" is being replaced by its voiced equivalent "dg". Replacing a voiceless "t" between two vowels with a voiced "d" is standard in North American English, where "tutor" and "Tudor", "traitor" and "trader" end up sounding the same. But we don't typically do it with the "tch" sound. The only other two words that I could find that have the same pattern of vowels and consonants as "congratulate", "spatula" and "flatulent" (I don't make these things up!) don't become "spadgula" and "fladgulent".  

I have two theories. Possibly we are recasting "congratulation" on the model of "adulation". But I rather doubt it.  I suspect our tendency to voice intervocalic consonants (a tendency that goes back to Anglo-Saxon times and accounts for why the plural of "half" is "halves") is being reinforced in the case of "congratulate" because, in addition to the two vowels surrounding the central "tch", the consonants leading up to it are all also voiced: n, g, r . In "spatula" and "flatulent", on the other hand, the initial consonants are voiceless.  Well, that's my theory; I would love to hear any comments from phonologists.

In any case, whether we say conGRADGalations or conGRATCHalations... kudos to all those Olympic athletes!

And, speaking of which, how do you pronounce "kudos"? Let me know (if you're a speaker of Canadian English) in my poll: 
https://www.facebook.com/events/216904545184539/permalink/216906155184378/?qa_ref=qd

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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Off with their heads!

Talking to a lawyer about a trademark dispute recently, I was taken aback when he started referring to the traitors who infringe trademarks. Goodness, I know he makes a living defending these suits (I mean that in the lawsuit sense, but I guess it also works in the "guy in a business suit" sense), but isn't that a rather strong word? Then I realized the word he had used was "traders". Yet another example of words that may not be homophones for other English speakers but are for us North Americans with our voiced intervocalic "t" (that's the fancy linguistic way of saying we make our t's into d's when they come between two vowels). I wouldn't have thought these words would be confused in writing, but sure enough, one can find anything on Google. I found 2000 examples of the phrase "accused of being a trader".