With this word in the news almost every day at the moment, we are hearing two pronunciations from British broadcasters: /ıˈreınıən/ and /ıˈrɑːnıən/. The first of these is, I think, the majority pronunciation, but the second is heard from many who would probably consider themselves better informed about the country and its people – for instance John Simpson. He and I crossed swords over this, and he alluded to our disagreement in one of his articles nearly thirty years ago, ending “He [i.e. GP] walked on, a disappointed man”. His arguments in favour of /ıˈrɑːnıən/ were two: that it was the pronunciation used by Iranians themselves (but as I pointed out, they are speaking English as a foreign language, and so not to be completely trusted on this – just as a Frenchman speaking English but pronouncing his country name with a nasalized vowel would not be copied by native English speakers); and second, that as the country name is /ıˈrɑːn/, then he was simply adding /-ıən/ in the normal way. I countered this with the example of Panama, which also ends in /ɑː/, but whose derived form is /pænəˈmeınıən/.

I was not trying to persuade him because of a belief that /eı/ was intrinsically the ‘better’ vowel to use, but so that he would conform to the one being used by the majority of his colleagues, and so be less conspicuous to listeners and viewers, who would otherwise start asking themselves (and me!) questions, and stop listening to the content of the report, which is far more important.

Interviewed on this morning’s BBC Radio4 ‘Today’ programme about the election of John Bercow as the new Speaker of the House of Commons, the MP Nadine Dorries (Conservative, Mid Bedfordshire) claimed that this was a vindictive act on behalf of the Labour Party. I wonder who committed it, then. I think she meant to say ‘on the part of’ the Labour Party.

‘On behalf of’ is increasingly used where ‘on the part of ‘ would be better. In fact, the traditional meanings of the two phrases are diametrically opposed: ‘on behalf of’ means acting in someone else’s interests, while ‘on the part of’ means made or done by the person or group mentioned.

The two expressions could be replaced by the simple ‘for’ (on behalf of) or ‘by’ (on the part of), but these carry less ‘weight’ than the longer phrases and so might more easily be missed.

If ‘on the part of’ disappears from the language, we shall have lost a useful way of distinguishing between what we do and what is done for us.

John Wells has been talking (here and here) about the loss of weak forms from English. Two more that have disappeared for an understandable reason are the weak forms of penny and pence.

Before decimalization of the British currency in 1971, any amount of money ending in -pence was pronounced /… p(ə)ns/: twopence (usually spelt tuppence) (/ˈtʌp(ə)ns/), threepence (/ˈθrɛp(ə)ns, ˈθrıp(ə)ns, ˈθrʌp(ə)ns/, fourpence (/ˈfɔːp(ə)ns/) etc. The adjectival forms ending in -penny were also reduced, to /p(ə)nı/, with the same reductions of the numeral, including halfpenny, which became /ˈheıpnı/ (final /f/ elided) (the pronunciations of tuppence and threepence show just how longstanding these forms were: tuppence must represent the shortening of /uː/ to /u/ and predate its split into /ʊ/ and /ʌ/ – spelt tuppens, the OED has an example from 1514).

Once we decimalized, it became necessary to distinguish between the old penny and the new (the coin worth 6d in ‘old’ money was retained for some years, but was now worth 2½p in the new). The way we all did this, I suspect without thinking much about it, was to use the strong form for the new value. I had half expected that when the new currency became familiar, we would all go back to our old ways, and the weak form would re-emerge, but this has not happened. I tested it in the early 1980s by asking for some 10½p stamps at a post office, and pronouncing the value as /ˈtɛmpnsˈheıpnı/. The counter clerk – older than me, and so well able to remember pre-decimal money – asked me to repeat my request, and it was only when I eventually said /ˈtɛn ənd ə hɑːf ˈpɛns/ that I got the stamps.

I started with two weak forms lost, but I think that makes three: unless someone can correct me, I think that half was only ever weakened when followed by -penny or -pence as an amount of money (i.e. not the family name Halfpenny), so that it is no longer heard.

T Morris, in a comment to this post, asks why there are no English ‘translations’ of French place names, such as there are in other languages (Parigi in Italian) or as there are for English names in other languages (Rome rather than Roma).

In fact, there are English spellings of French place names that differ from the French originals, but they seem to be reducing in number over the years. We used always to write Lyons and Marseilles for Lyon and Marseille, and going further back in history, Calais used to be written as Calice. ‘The Jackdaw of Rheims‘ (one of the best-known Ingoldsby Legends) provides another example. As a (very) small child, I imagined that Dunkirk must be in Scotland, and Ushant never seemed to me to refer to a place in France (I think it is now usually seen in its French spelling – Ouessant).

The same thing is happening with other foreign place names – Saragossa is now usually Zaragoza, and Corunna has become La Coruña. As we travel more, we become aware that our spelling and pronunciation of foreign place names has got out of step with the native, and we adjust our version to make it more similar to the original. With spelling that is easy, but the pronunciation will still be an approximation, better or worse according to our individual ability to imitate, or willingness to do so. The changes take place particularly for those place names that have dropped out of our consciousness, and then come back to us – Flushing became Vlissingen when car ferries started to use the port more regularly, and Leghorn became Livorno when it became an easily accessible tourist resort.

The regions of France still retain their English names – Brittany, Normandy, Burgundy, Gascony show no signs of becoming Bretagne, Normandie, Bourgogne or Gascogne.

If we turn the question around, it seems odd that the French have so few spellings of their own for place names in the British Isles – after all, (Norman) French was the language of government in England for about three hundred years. I can find a handful – Londres, Douvres, Cantorbéry, Edimbourg, Cornouailles, Tamise (the Thames), and the names of the constituent parts of the islands – Angleterre, Ecosse, Pays de Galles, and Irlande, plus Grande Bretagne itself. The French pronunciation of English place names without different spellings is, however, just as gallicized as our pronunciation of French names is anglicized – as is to be expected.

Throughout the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and for some years afterwards, the Square of the Gate of Heavenly Peace was frequently mentioned in the news.

Then at the time of the student democracy protests in 1989, with no explanation that I can remember, we were told that they were concentrated in Tiananmen Square (which most people had great difficulty in pronouncing). It was only some time later that I realized that these two names referred to the same place (I know nothing of Chinese apart from how to anglicize its pronunciation).

The New China News Agency had already decided that from January 1979 all Chinese names would henceforth be reported by them in their Pinyin spellings, and this has gradually filtered through to all English news reports, although in 1989 we were still hearing about Peking rather than Beijing, but this doesn’t seem to me a reason for a translation of a place name to be abandoned in favour of an incomprehensible Chinese name. Could it have had anything to do with the contradiction between its name and the actions of the Chinese government?

For the record, Tiananmen has three syllables, and is most accurately anglicized as /’tjɛn æn mən/ with all four nasals clearly articulated.