A spelling pronunciation is the pronunciation of a word according to its spelling, at odds with a standard or traditional pronunciation. Words spelled with silent letters (e.g. island, knife), or traditionally pronounced with reduced vowels or omitted consonants (e.g. cupboard, Worcester), may be subject to a spelling pronunciation.
If a word's spelling was standardized prior to sound changes that produced its "traditional" pronunciation, a spelling pronunciation may reflect an even older pronunciation. This is often the case with compound words (e.g. waistcoat, cupboard, forehead). It is also the case for many words with silent letters (e.g. often), though not all--silent letters are sometimes added for etymological reasons, to reflect a word's spelling in its language of origin (e.g. victual, rhyming with little but derived from Late Latin victualia). Some silent letters were added on the basis of erroneous etymologies, as in the cases of the words island and scythe.
Spelling pronunciations are generally considered incorrect next to the traditionally accepted, and usually more widespread, pronunciation. If a spelling pronunciation persists and becomes more common, it may eventually join the existing form as equally acceptable (for example waistcoat and often), or even become the dominant pronunciation (as with forehead and falcon). If a rare word is more often encountered in writing than in speech, the spelling pronunciation may be assumed by most, while the traditional pronunciation is maintained only by older or educated individuals.
Video Spelling pronunciation
Prevalence and causes
Large numbers of easily noticeable spelling pronunciations only occur in languages such as French and English where spelling tends to not indicate the current pronunciation. Because in all languages, even in languages such as Finnish, at least some words are not spelled as pronounced, spelling pronunciations can arise in any language when the majority of the populace only obtains enough education to learn how to read and write, but not enough to understand when spelling doesn't indicate modern pronunciation; in other words, when many people do not clearly understand the relationship between spelling and pronunciation.
On the other hand, spelling pronunciations are also evidence of the reciprocal effects of spoken and written language on each other. Many spellings represent older forms and corresponding older pronunciations. Some spellings, however, are not etymologically correct.
Though many people may believe (to various degrees of accuracy) that the written language is "more correct", this (in turn) can become a self-fulfilling prophecy, with the written language affecting and changing the spoken language and resulting in either a pronunciation similar to an older one or a new pronunciation, when a spelling does not represent an older pronunciation.
Maps Spelling pronunciation
Examples of English words with common spelling pronunciations
- a, the indefinite article, is usually pronounced /?/, which is a reasonable contraction of the word one /w?n/ it once originated from. If stress or very careful articulation is put on it, it is, however, pronounced /e?/; this is a spelling pronunciation.
- GIF, widely pronounced /'??f/, originally /'d??f/.
- often, pronounced with /t/, which is in fact a reversion to the 15th century pronunciation, though the pronunciation without /t/ is still preferred by 73% of British speakers and 78% of American speakers. Older dictionaries do not list the pronunciation with /t/, though the 2nd edition of the OED does (and the first edition notes the pronunciation with the comment that it is prevalent in the south of England and "often used in singing"; see the Dictionary of American Regional English for contemporaneous citations discussing the status of the competing pronunciations). The sporadic nature of such shifts is apparent upon examination of examples such as whistle, listen and soften, where the t remains largely unpronounced.
- forehead once rhymed with horrid, but is now pronounced with the second syllable as /h?d/ by 85% of Americans and 65% of people in Britain. This is in fact a reversion to its original pronunciation.
- clothes was historically pronounced the same way as the verb close ("Whenas in silks my Julia goes/.../The liquefaction of her clothes"--Herrick), but many speakers now insert a /ð/, pronouncing a voiced th. This is in fact a reversion to its 15th-century pronunciation.
- salmon, occasionally pronounced with /l/.
- falcon is now nearly always pronounced with /l/, and just 3% of speakers have no /l/. The /l/ was lacking in the old pronunciation: compare French faucon and the older English spellings faucon and fawcon. This may suggest either analogical change or the reborrowing of the original Latin.
- alm, balm, psalm; now often pronounced with /l/ in some parts of the United States. In most of the United Kingdom, the traditional /?:m/ pronunciation continues to prevail.
- comptroller, often pronounced with /mp/; accepted pronunciation is "controller" (the mp spelling is based on the mistaken idea that the word has something to do with comp(u)tare "count, compute", but it comes from contre-roll "file copy", both the verb and its agent noun meaning "compare originals and file copies").
- ye, the article as in Ye Old Coffee Shoppe, pronounced not as the, as it should be, but as if spelled with a y instead of the printer's mark for Þ, the letter thorn. (The archaic/obsolete 2nd person nominative plural pronoun ye in Middle and early Modern English is correctly pronounced like the beginning of you.)
- Taking the insular flat-topped g of northern scripts as a z- in names like Mackenzie, Menzies, Dalziel (originally pronounced with the value of /j/).
- tortilla and other words from Spanish with the double-L pronounced /l/ instead of /j/ (the latter being the closest approximation to the sound in Latin American Spanish); similarly the Italian-sourced maraschino (cherry) with the /?/ associated with that consonant cluster in German instead of the /sk/ of Italian.
- victuals, pronounced /'v?t?ls/ (rhyming with skittles), whose -c- (for a consonant lost long before the word was borrowed from French) was reintroduced on etymological grounds, and sometimes pronounced with /kt/.
- The pronunciation of waistcoat as waist-coat is now more common than the previous pronunciation /'w?sk?t/.
- conduit, historically pronounced /'k?nd?t/ or /'k?nd?t/, is now nearly always /'k?ndju:?t/, /'k?ndw?t/ or /'k?ndu?t/ in most of the United States.
- covert, historically pronounced /'k?v?t/ (reflecting its link with the verb cover) is now usually /'ko?v?t/, by analogy to overt.
- medicine, historically pronounced with two syllables but now quite often with three (some speakers use two when they mean medicaments and three when they mean medical knowledge; the pronunciation with three syllables is standard in the United States).
- Bartholomew, formerly pronounced /'b?rt?lmi/ or /b?r't?l?mi/, is now /b?r'??l?mju/.
- Anthony (< Lat. Antonius), now (in the US) /'æn??ni/.
- Numerous place-names with traditional pronunciations have been displaced by ones influenced by the spelling: St. Louis, formerly /sæn 'lu:i:/ now (locally) /se?nt 'lu:?s/, Papillion (Nebraska), formerly /?pæpi'j?n/ now /p?'pilj?n/, Beatrice (Nebraska) formerly and still somewhat currently /bi'ætr?s/, now /'bi?tr?s/. Montpelier, the capital of Vermont, is now pronounced /m?nt'pi:li?r/ instead of the French-influenced /m??pelje/.
- Sir George Everest's surname is pronounced . The mountain named after him - Mount Everest - is generally pronounced .
- Interjections such as tsk tsk! or tut tut! (a pair of dental clicks), now commonly /'t?sk 't?sk/ and /'t?t 't?t/.
- The words Arctic, Antarctic and Antarctica were originally pronounced without the first /k/, but the spelling pronunciation has become very common. The first "c" was originally added to the spelling for etymological reasons and was then misunderstood as not being silent.
- ski, originally pronounced /?i:/ (as it is a loanword from Norwegian), now usually /ski:/.
- zoology, which is often pronounced "zoo-ology" (/zu'?l?d?i/). This is not quite "spelling pronunciation" because it is never pronounced "zoo-logy" (/'zul?d?i/). It is probably influenced by the word zoo (derived from zoological garden), which rhymes with goo. (It has been posited that dropping the diaeresis in zoölogy antiquated the pronunciation /z??'?l?d?i/.) A similar case might be the pronunciation (not in the US) of hecatomb as rhyming with "deck a tomb" (that is, /'h?.k?.tu:m/).
- hotel, originally pronounced /o?t?l/ due to being calqued on the French hôtel, is now usually pronounced with an audible h. Nevertheless, maître d'hôtel is pronounced /?me?tr? d??'t?l/.
- herb, a word with origins in Old French, is pronounced with a silent h in the United States. The same was true of the United Kingdom until the 19th century, a change influenced by the spelling.
- Ralph, originally pronounced /'re?f/ or /'ra:f/ in the UK (at least in England), now often /'rælf/.
- The assumption that s in German is not conditionally homophonous with sch; sometimes made for German calques such as spiel and stein.
Opinions about spelling pronunciation
Spelling pronunciations give rise to varied opinions. Often those who retain the old pronunciation consider the spelling pronunciation to be a mark of ignorance or insecurity. Those who use a spelling pronunciation may not be aware that it is one, and consider the historically authentic version to be slovenly, since it "slurs over" a letter. Conversely, the users of some innovative pronunciations such as "Febuary" (for February) may regard the historically (and phonetically) authentic version as a pedantic spelling pronunciation.
Henry Watson Fowler (1858-1933) reports that in his day there was a conscious movement among schoolteachers and others encouraging people to abandon anomalous traditional pronunciations and "speak as you spell". According to major scholars of early modern English (Dobson, Wyld et al.), already in the 17th century there was beginning an "intellectual" trend in England to "pronounce as you spell". This presupposes a standard spelling system which was beginning to form at that time. Similarly, quite a large number of "corrections" slowly spread from scholars to the general public in France, starting several centuries ago.
A different variety of spelling pronunciations are phonetic adaptations, i.e., pronunciations of the written form of foreign words within the frame of the phonemic system of the language that accepts them: an example of this process is garage ([?a?a:?] in French) sometimes pronounced ['?æ??d??] in English. Such adaptations are quite natural, and often preferred by speech-conscious and careful speakers.
In children and foreigners
Children who read a great deal often produce spelling pronunciations, since, assuming they do not consult a dictionary, they have only the spelling to indicate the pronunciation of the words they encounter which are uncommon in the spoken language. Well-read second language learners may also produce spelling pronunciations.
In some instances a population in a formerly non-English speaking area may retain such second language markers in the now native-English speaking population. For example, Scottish standard English is replete with spelling pronunciations from when Scots was subsumed by English in the 17th century.
However, since there are many words which one reads far more often than one hears, the point also affects adult native-language speakers. In such circumstances, the "spelling pronunciation" may well be more comprehensible than any other. This, in turn, leads to the language evolution mentioned above. What is a spelling pronunciation in one generation often becomes standard in the next.
In other languages
In French, the modern pronunciation of the 16th-century French author Montaigne as [m??t??], rather than the contemporary [m??ta?], is a spelling pronunciation.
When English club was first borrowed into French, the approved pronunciation was /klab/, as being a reasonable approximation of the English. The standard then became /klyb/ on the basis of the spelling, and later, in Europe, /kloeb/, deemed closer to the English original. The standard pronunciation in Quebec French remains [kl?b]. Similarly, shampooing "product for washing the hair" at the time of borrowing was /???pui?/; now it is /???pw??/
In Hebrew, the word ????? ([?e?t], meaning 'sin') is sometimes pronounced ['?e?tä], as suggested by its spelling, especially by children. Other examples of spelling pronunciations are the Sephardic ???? (['kol], meaning all) being pronounced as ['käl] and ????????? (['tso.o?äjim], meaning noon) being pronounced as ['tsä.o?äjim] due to how the kamatz katan vowel point (??), which indicates [o] is visually identical to kamatz which indicates [ä] : see Sephardi Hebrew.
In Italian, a few early English loanwords are pronounced according to Italian spelling rules. These include water ('toilet bowl', from English water (closet)), pronounced ['vater], and tramway, pronounced [tran'vai]. The Italian word ovest ('west') comes from a spelling pronunciation of French ouest (which, in turn, is a phonetic transcription of English west); this particular instance of spelling pronunciation was only possible before the 16th century, when letters u and v were still indistinct. A few foreign proper names are normally pronounced according to the pronunciation of the original language (or a close approximation of it), but they retain an older spelling pronunciation when used as parts of Italian street names. E.g., the name of Edward Jenner retains their usual English pronunciation in most contexts, but Viale Edoardo Jenner (a main street in Milan) is pronounced ['vjale edo'ardo 'j?nner]. The usage of such old-fashioned spelling pronunciations is probably encouraged by the custom of translating given names when naming streets after foreign people (as e.g. Edoardo in place of Edward, or Giorgio in place of George for Via Giorgio Washington).
In Spanish, the "ch" in some German words and surnames is pronounced /t?/ or /?/ instead of /x/. Bach is correctly pronounced [bax], and Kuchen is ['kuxen], but Rorschach is ['ror?a?] rather than ['ror?ax], Mach is [ma?] or [mat?], and Kirchner is ['kir?ner] or ['kirt?ner]. Other spelling pronunciations are club pronounced [klub], iceberg pronounced [i?e'?er] in Spain (in American Spanish, it's pronounced ['aisber?]), and folclor and folclore as translations of folklore, pronounced [fol'klor] and [fol'klo?e]. Also in Spanish, the acute accent in the French word élite is taken as a stress mark and the word is pronounced ['elite].
When Polish borrows words from English with spelling preserved, the pronunciation tends to follow the rules of Polish. Words such as "marketing" are pronounced as spelled instead of the more faithful "markytyng".
In Vietnamese, the letter "v" as an initial consonant is often pronounced like a "y" ([j]) in the central and southern varieties. However, in formal speech, speakers will often revert to the spelling pronunciation, which is also increasingly being used in casual speech as well.
See also
- Folk etymology
- Heterography
- Hypercorrection
- Hyperforeignism
- Orthography
- Spelling reform
- Padonkaffsky jargon
References
Sources
- See the index entries under "spelling pronunciation" from Leonard Bloomfield, Language (originally published 1933; current edition 1984, University of Chicago Press, Chicago; ISBN 81-208-1195-X).
- Most of the etymologies and spelling histories above are taken from the Oxford English Dictionary.
- Neuman, Yishai. L'influence de l'écriture sur la langue, PhD dissertation, Paris: Sorbonne Nouvelle, 2009.
- --. "Graphophonemic Assignment", G. Khan (ed.), Encyclopedia of Hebrew Language and Linguistics, Volume 2, Leiden: Brill, pp. 135-145
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