In the days before most people were literate, there were only two ways to pronounce a foreign place name – you either pronounced it more or less how the locals pronounced it, or you ignored their name and gave the place/river/mountain/whatever a name of your own.

This meant we said Paris as ‘parriss’ and Lyon as ‘lions’ (like more than one of the animals). This is because in early medieval French, Paris was pronounced in French as ‘parreess’, and Lyon as ‘lyonss’ (-y as a consonant, not a vowel). In the course of time, final -s disappeared from French pronunciation, but not from English (I’m talking 12th-13 Century here), but by this time, the names were so familiar to English speakers that they had become English words and started to develop according to English rules rather than French. (more…)

I’ve been very flattered by the review of my piece on the Oxford BBC Guide to Pronunciation in languagehat. It’s started a lot of reaction as well, several points being raised about other things I’ve mentioned. I’ll take them up one at a time.

First, in my piece on the Dictionary, I used the same “phonetic” transcription as the editors, including the -uu- for the vowel of “wood”. This is not the “standard” BBC Modified Spelling for the sound, as anyone who’s seen the BBC Pronouncing Dictionary of British Names will know. The original system was refined over many years, and first devised by Arthur Lloyd James in the late 1920s, when he was a lecturer in phonetics at UCL and secretary to the BBC’s Advisory Committee on Spoken English. While not in any way equivalent to IPA, the Modified Spelling (MS) serves its purposes admirably: its intention is to allow an English speaker to pronounce anything written in the MS in such a way that it is immediately recognisable, but not pretentious. I think that the MS symbol for the “wood” vowel, which was double O with a short mark above it, was far preferable to -uu- which looks very much like a long vowel. A single -u- is not satisfactory either, as it looks to the non-initiate like the vowel of “bud”, which would also be wrong. Lloyd James had obviously thought this through, but the OUP editors, who I believe insisted on the change for the latest guide, have not.

So, later, when I commented on the pronunciation of P.G.Wodehouse, I used an ordinary re-spelling, to show that the first syllable is pronounced like the word “wood”, and the second like the word “house”.

The approaching tenth anniversary of Diana, Princess of Wales’s death brings Althorp back into the news. This is where she grew up, and where she is buried. The BBC first became aware of the difficulty about pronunciation well before the Second World War – Broadcast English II, published in 1930, included it, with the pronunciation áwltrŏp. Later, in about 1952, the Pronunciation Assistant, G.M. “Elizabeth” Miller, wrote to the then Viscount Althorp (Diana’s father) about it, and was told the same thing. I, as Pronunciation Adviser, wrote to the present Earl Spencer (Diana’s brother) in 1992, and in January the following year, he wrote back saying “áwltrŏp. This is definitely correct. I can remember my grandfather pronouncing it like this; my octogenarian great-aunt does, too – and it is clear that alternative pronunciations only came about recently, out of laziness (it became simpler not to correct the many who mispronounce it – the majority of whom were foreign visitors to the house.)” See here for more on the argument. He included the same pronunciation in his history of Althorp

However, some time after this, he succumbed to the pressure, and put out a press statement saying that henceforth the house should be called ‘áwlthorp’ – as spelt.

According to BBC News 24, two car bombs have been successfully diffused in London. I don’t think that is what they are intending to say, but every TV anchor and reporter on the spot is saying this. If it were true, it would mean that the car bombs had been spread out across the capital. What the journalists mean to say, but are mispronouncing, is that the car bombs have been defused.

The two words are frequently mixed up, with defused most often being pronounced “diffused”, but they should be kept clearly apart, as, if a bomb explodes, its contents are diffused over a large area.

defuse:  DEE-FEWZ (both syllables equally stressed – almost as if they were separate words)

diffuse: diFEWZ (only the second syllable stressed)

The knighthood conferred on this author has brought him back into the spotlight. Unfortunately, many people still find it difficult to pronounce his name correctly, including some BBC newsreaders (Natasha Kaplinsky on 18 June, for instance). The man in the street can be excused – not everyone know Sir Salman personally, nor speaks Urdu, but everyone working for the BBC has access to SpeakEasy, the Pronunciation Unit’s computerised database which I helped design in the 1990s. This not only gives a re-spelling of all its entries, but also has a voice component, so that broadcasters in doubt can listen to it as well. What a shame that so many fail to take advantage of it.

For the record, the correct pronunciation is sal-MAAN ROOSH-di (stressed syllables in capitals, -al as in “pal”, -oo as in “foot”)

A number of broadcasting journalists are of Asian origin. Most – if not all – of them speak English without any trace of a “foreign” or non-native accent – until it comes to names from their parents’ part of the world. A case in point is Afghanistan, which Mishal Husain pronounces with a very un-English sound for the “gh” spelling. BBC policy for pronunciation has always been to use the nearest English sound for the native one for all languages, in order to make it easy for the presenter to pronounce, and for the listener to understand. The problem is that while Ms Husain may very well be able to pronounce Urdu or Pashtu or Dari with native competence, can she do the same for French, Spanish, Portuguese or German? And how about Hungarian or Xhosa? All she is doing is parading her knowledge to the audience (listen to me – I know how to pronounce this!) and at the same time exhibiting her ignorance of the languages she does not know. If we must now say a voiced uvular fricative instead of [g] in Afghanistan, then why not the rolled uvular ‘r’ in Paris (and don’t forget – the final ’s’ is silent!) instead of the long-established ‘parriss’?

Yesterday I had to go to a funeral. There was a complete order of service, as is normal these days, and I was rather surprised to see, not once, but three times, reference to the deceased’s “internment”. This had nothing to do with service in the IRA during the Northern Irish Troubles, but was telling us where his body was to lie after the ceremony. I put the confusion down to poor proof-reading in the hurry to produce the sheet in time, so I was very much taken aback to hear the priest in charge (this was a very high Anglican funeral, complete with request for God to bless the Pope – Henry VIII would not have been amused), having told us that the body would be interred in the parish burial ground, go on to invite all members of the congregation to attend the “internment”. The order of service was clearly deliberately spelled in that way.

Ironically, in her eulogy, the widow told us that one of the things her late husband had always hated, and pointed out in books and newspapers, was misspelling.

inter = bury

intern = imprison without trial

interment = burial

internment = imprisonment without trial

In reports sent from Baghdad on 28 May 2007, in which Paul Wood commented on the talks between US and Iranian representatives, he clearly pronounced the word nuclear as ['nju:kyul@] (-@ representing the neutral vowel, schwa). This is very close to the pronunciation Pres. George W Bush uses, and for which he has been pilloried in the Press. It seems a strange mispronunciation to make, as the word clear is so common. What I think is happening is that the speaker – whether Paul Wood or ‘Dubya’ – is likening the word to those words which do end in -cular: e.g. jocular, vernacular, funicular, and also creating an assimilation of the vowel in the first syllable [ju:] to a second, non-orthographic, syllable, aided by the [l] which is darkened also by assimilation to the previous vowel.

Philip Belcher points out that the “correct” Latin pronunciation of ‘difficile’ is [di'fɪkɪleɪ]. He is right – for Classical Latin. The letter C was always pronounced [k]. However, the way in which English developed through the centuries meant that gradually the pronunciation of Latin words that were frequently used in English changed at the same time, and in the same way, so that C before AE, E, I, OE or Y came to be pronounced [s] – Caesar, Cicero, coeliac, Cymbeline. I don’t imagine for a second that Philip is suggesting we should go back to the Classical Latin pronunciations of these words. I’m sure that at no point did the English think they were moving away from the Latin pronunciation – just as they did not realise that their pronunciation of English words was changing at the same time.

Scientific terms – particularly the specific names of plants and animals – have generally been pronounced according to the traditional English development of Latin pronunciation – V as [v] rather than [w], AE as [i:], not [aɪ], and C as [s] or [k] depending on the following vowel (even /ʃ/ in some cases – prima facie /ˈpraɪmə ˈfeɪʃi/ comes to mind). Therefore, the Latin word DIFFICILE becomes [di'fɪsɪli], just as facsimile is pronounced [fæk'sɪmɪli].

An article in the Independent on Sunday (10 December 2006), headed “Why should the Iranians help? Here’s why” starts with the sentence “It is difficult to under-estimate the taboo which has been broken by the Iraq Study Group’s suggestion that the United States seeks a diplomatic engagement with Syria and more particularly Iran, in order to alleviate its deteriorating situation in Iraq.”

Putting to one side whether “seeks” or “seek” would be better here, the sentence opens with a phrase that means the opposite of what the writer intends to say.

If we under-estimate something, we do not pay as much attention to it as it deserves. Here the writer wants to say that the breaking of the taboo is such an important step that no matter how important we think it, it is actually even more important.

Two ways in which he could have expressed himself better are “It is difficult to over-estimate …” or “It is easy to under-estimate …”