Pronunciation and spelling

Text 5

(from “ An Introduction to Language”)

The confusion of speech with writing, the graphic symbolization of speech, has given rise to many mistaken notions, among them the notion that if English spelling were to be reformed to eliminate all ambiguities of a given symbol and all "silent letters"—not a bad idea if it were possible—the lan­guage itself would somehow be vastly improved, and furthermore, foreigners would have comparatively little difficulty in learning it. Such confusion has led to the naive concoction of new English alphabets and at least one "global alphabet."

Another manifestation of this confusion is the notion of many literate people who fancy that English words should be pronounced as they are written, thus giving rise to what are called spelling pronunciations. This notion is by no means new; it is in fact perfectly natural that a rather large percentage of younger speakers should have restored the long-lost sound symbolized by the t in often (though it has not as yet been restored in soften) because that is the way they have learned to say the word; but the pronunci­ation with t nevertheless began as a spelling pronunciation and is not really very old.¹ It is similar to the reanalysis of the previously amalgamated com­pound forehead, with secondary stress on -head —a pronunciation not even

¹G. H. McKnight, Modem English in the Making (New York, 1928), p. 568, cites the following dialogue from what was in 1928 a recent English novel:

"What sort of people are the Herberts? Is Mrs. Herbert a lady?" "She is the sort of person who pronounces the 't' in 'often.'"

Poor Mrs. Herbert is thus obliquely condemned as "no lady." Her then crude spelling pro­nunciation has since, however, become widespread in socially and intellectually exalted circles for more than a generation.

The Oxford English Dictionary (the relevant section was published in 1902) notes that the pronunciation with t, though "not recognized in the dictionaries, is now frequent in the south of England, and is often used in singing." It recognizes, that is, records, only the traditional pronunciation without t. This great scholarly monument, hereafter referred to as the OED, attempts to give the complete history, so far as it is known, of every word entered. The first section was published in 1884; the last, in 1928. A supplementary volume appeared in 1933. The work was previously titled A New English Dictionary on Historical Principles, but since 1933, when it was reissued with a new title page reading The Oxford English Dictionary, the older abbreviation NED has given way to OED. '

Examples of spelling pronunciations are not hard to find; for instance, breeches traditionally rimes with riches and clapboard with scabbard. The initial h sound in humor, host, and hostel —words that come into English from Old French—is due entirely to the spelling with h; humor wavers between pronunciation with and without the initial breathing, which, incidentally, never occurs in honor, honest, heirless), and hour. The h, of course, has never had any phonetic significance in either Old or Modern French; its occurrence in the spellings represents a remodeling of early Old French spelling on the basis of the Latin originals. Many pronunciations based upon written forms have long been universal, for instance that of author with the middle con­sonant as in ether; the word appears in late Middle English (from the four­teenth to the sixteenth century), taken from Old French without the written h, which was latter inserted in a misguided effort to make the word look more "learned." Ultimately the pseudo-learned spelling effected the change in pronunciation, with the written th being interpreted as a spelling for the sound that it usually represents in English. The same thing is now happening to thyme.

The confusion of writing with speech is perhaps most clearly illustrated in the layman's concept of languages as being "phonetic" or "unphonetic." The terms are frequently so used; thus, one may be informed that Spanish is a "phonetic language,"³ whereas English is not. What is meant by such absurd statements seems to be simply that the spelling conventions of Spanish symbolize the pronunciation of Spanish more satisfactorily than do our own spelling conventions that of English, about which we shall have much more

²The jingle ran something like this:

There was a little girl

Who had a little curl

Right in the middle of her forehead;

And when she was good

She was very, very good;

But when she was bad she was horrid.

It may no longer be very widely current in juvenile circles.

³It is, according to Miriam Chapin, "easy, phonetic, musical" (How People Talk [New York, 1947], p. 136).

to say later. But to speak of one language as being more or less phonetic than another is to speak linguistic nonsense, since all language is by its very nature phonetic—that is, made up of combinations of sounds, or phones— regardless of how these sounds may be symbolized in writing. There are, in fact, many languages that have never been written at all.

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