What is the plural of diocese? Easy, you might think - it’s dioceses. Ah yes, but how do you pronounce it? Until 1999, and the tenth edition of the Concise Oxford Dictionary, no help was given by most ‘ordinary’ dictionaries. They said nothing at all about the plural, with the implication that it was regular: di-o-ce-ses (4 syllables). This is still the case for the English Pronouncing Dictionary, and the Oxford Dictionary of Pronunciation. However, starting in 1990 with his first edition, John Wells noted in the Longman Pronunciation Dictionary that an alternative was to make an analogy with analysis ~

An older spelling for diocese was ‘diocess’. If we had kept this spelling, perhaps the plural, ‘diocesses’, would have stood more chance of surviving. We already have abscess ~ abscesses, and process ~ processes.

A few weeks ago, just after we changed the clocks to GMT, Fi Glover, presenting ‘Saturday Live’ on Radio 4, referred to the ‘moniker’ “Spring forward, fall back”. What she meant was mnemonic (pronounced ‘neeMONNik’). None of the possible scenarios I can think of as the reason for this mistake reflects very well on her. Was it wrongly written in her script, was she unable to pronounce the word, or did she genuinely believe that this was the correct term or pronunciation for this sort of aide-mémoire?

I have been reminded of this as I read Down and Out in Eighteenth-Century London by Tim Hitchcock, Professor of History at the University of Hertfordshire. This is a book crammed full of facts about the lives of poor people in London at that time, including comments on the weather conditions on particular days, but there is a curious mistake that keeps appearing: the word pre-requisite, where perquisite is clearly intended. For instance, in the chapter entitled “Sleeping Rough”, we find the following sentence:

“At night, cleared and disregarded, the bulks [wooden shelves that stuck out over the pavement in front of shops], formed a convenient shelter for the homeless, an almost traditional prerequisite of the poor.”

The required reading here is definitely perquisite, or its modern abbreviation, perk. The same is true for most of the other instances I have so far come across. One however, is ambiguous:

“Even parish paupers demanded fresh linen every week, and its provision formed one of the most substantial prerequisites of domestic service.” (p.100)

Does this mean that it was necessary to have enough linen for a fresh set every week in order to be employed in domestic service, or, more likely, that as a consequence of being employed in domestic service, fresh linen was provided every week?

Once more, the reason for this mistake is unclear. Does Prof. Hitchcock really believe that ‘perk’ is an abbreviation for prerequisite? Does his spell-checker automatically ‘correct’ perquisite to prerequisite? Does the fault lie with Prof. Hitchcock’s editor or proof reader at the publishers (Hambledon Continuum)? Does no one at the publishers bother to check the copy before publishing it?

Lilli Lee asks if we can still order Peking Duck, or whether we now have to ask for Beijing Duck. Some names are fixed, and regardless of other changes in the language, they remain. Strangely, this has happened three times with phrases containing the word duck: we can still order Peking Duck and Bombay Duck (not Mumbai Duck), and the species of duck known as the Muscovy Duck has not changed its name to Moscow Duck.

The Bombay Stock Exchange has not changed its name either, and I don’t see any suggestion that the Indian film industry should become known as Mollywood instead of Bollywood.

We now travel to Livorno instead of Leghorn, but leghorn is still a breed of chicken, and a type of straw hat.

A letter in the Independent newspaper last week (Wednesday 21 November), from Shirin Tata of London, explained the spelling and pronunciation of Peking as ‘a close approximation to the Cantonese name for the city (”puck-ing” with a hard “p”)’. This came about, the writer says, because early contacts between Europe and China were with traders and seamen from the south of China, and the Europeans copied their pronunciation for place names. This explanation is similar to that for the origin of the English name for Livorno in Italy: Leghorn (now obsolete), which is a close approximation to the local dialectal form for the name: Ligorno.

However, I have a different explanation for Peking: some of the earliest European travellers to China were Jesuit priests - the first dictionary of Chinese for Europeans was written by Jesuits - and as these would mainly be from southern European countries and speaking Romance languages, they would have transcribed what they heard in terms of their own languages, whether French, Spanish, Italian or Portuguese. In all these languages, the voiceless plosives (/p. t. k/) are unaspirated, unlike the English equivalents. As the initial consonant of the Mandarin name for Peking is also unaspirated, the priests will have written down a ‘p’. The following vowel (or diphthong) is, or at least starts as, a half close front vowel, and the spelling convention for this in all the Western Romance languages is ‘e’ (or ‘é’ in French). The next consonant is also unaspirated, but pronounced in the palatal area, auditorily closest to the sound represented in European languages by a ‘k’ when it occurs before a front vowel, as in this case. The final velar nasal is a sound that occurs only allophonically in French, Italian, Spanish and Portuguese, so again, the nearest sound was used: [n]. This gives us the French version of the name Pékin, borrowed into English (the spelling ‘Pekin’ was common at one time).

I find this more satisfactory as an explanation than that of Shirin Tata, as it accounts for the initial ‘p’ in the English - and general European - spelling. Both the Cantonese and Mandarin pronunciations have what Shirin describes as a ‘hard’ p - in other words, an unaspirated sound, which is far more similar to English /b/ than it is to English /p/.

I’ve been reading some Defoe novels recently, and it’s surprising how many ‘mistakes’ in grammar he makes that are frequently seen these days and attributed to the poor teaching of English over the last half century: confusion of who and whom; using I in contexts that clearly demand me; and these sort of … are three that I particularly remember. The editions that I’ve been reading are all reputable ones, so I don’t think we can attribute these to printers’ errors. For those in any doubt of the antiquity of these ‘mistakes’, Defoe died in 1731.

What are we to make of this? I think we have to say that at all stages in the life of any language there are points of grammar that cause problems for even the best writers. Defoe came of a fairly well-to-do family, and received a good education, so his ignorance cannot be ‘blamed’. Since the loss of case as a regular feature of English, the remnants, in the form of the personal pronouns, have been under threat in all but the most obvious contexts, and the phrase ’sort of’ seems to behave as a compound adjective rather than anything else, leaving the determiner ‘these’ to agree in number with the following noun (which is usually plural).

Samuel Johnson famously defined a lexicographer as “a harmless drudge”, and there were a few other semi-humorous comments in his dictionary, including the non-definition of ‘trolmydames’: “Of this word I know not the meaning”.
Chambers (or, as it used to be called, Chambers’s) Dictionary is well worth reading like any other book, or at least browsing from one entry to another, because it has some light-hearted definitions in its pages. I am rather sad that the definition of ‘lunch’ no long includes the phrase “a restaurateur’s term for an ordinary man’s dinner”, that was in the Mid-Century edition, but ‘fog’: “thick mist” and ‘mist’: “thin fog” are still there, as are ‘middle-aged’: “between youth and old age, variously reckoned to suit the reckoner” and ‘Agapemone’: “a religious community of men and women whose ’spiritual marriages’ were in some cases not strictly spiritual”.
Chambers is not the only dictionary to repay a close reading. Einar Haugen’s Norwegian-English Dictionary, of 1965 (published by Universitetsforlaget, Oslo, and The University of Wisconsin Press) has, at the word ‘kansjke’: “perhaps, maybe: … kanskje blir vi ferdige med denne ordboka en gang - maybe we’ll finish this dictionary sometime”.
Professor Gregory James, Head of the Language Centre at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, has published a weighty tome on the making of dictionaries in Tamil which all hinges on the way ‘rice’ is defined: most of the Tamil dictionaries, while paying lip service to the principle that a dictionary should never use a word in its definitions that is not itself defined elsewhere, call ‘rice’ “an esculent grain”, but never define ‘esculent’. (A History of Tamil Dictionaries, Gregory James, ISBN 81-85602-76-X)

An open letter to the BBC suggests that it needs a Language Advisor, not (according to the interview Ian Bruton-Simmonds, one of the authors, gave to the Today programme this morning) to shame broadcasters publicly about their poor English, but to have a quiet word with them, so that they don’t do it again.
(more…)

I quite agree with Abdul (writing in response to my post on Afghanistan, 18 June 2007) that no one can be expected to know the “correct” pronunciation of every name. That is why the BBC has its Pronunciation Research Unit, which is dedicated to finding out the native pronunciation of any name (or indeed any word) that they are asked for, and then to provide a version to broadcasters that is acceptable to a native speaker but at the same time not too difficult for an English speaker to reproduce. (more…)

Abdul is right in his comment on “Kofi Annan and Edward Stourton”: the news readers can’t deal with the sounds and phonotactics of other languages - and the Pronunciation Research Unit doesn’t expect them to. As he points out, the syllable-final -h of the name Fahmi can have two solutions: ignore it, and say /fa:mi/, or replace it with /x/ as in “loch” or “Bach”. This is the practice followed by all languages when borrowing: use the nearest sounds of your own language in order to approximate the sounds of the borrowed word. Professor John Wells is discussing this problem in relation to English loan-words in Japanese on his blog at the moment.
In an earlier post, I was critical of Mishal Husain precisely because she does not follow this practice when it is a question of a name from a language she knows intimately. When she is speaking English, she should not introduce “foreign” sounds - it is disconcerting to the listener.

When Mr Annan was appointed as Secretary General of the United Nations, we in the BBC’s Pronunciation Research Unit were sent a tape of his inauguration, in the course of which he had to pronounce his own name. He clearly said “I, KOHfi ANNann” (re-spelt to show where he placed the stresses: -oh as in ‘ohm’). Consequently, this was the recommendation that the Unit made to the Corporation’s broadcasting staff, and so far as I am aware, and judging by the Radio 4 newsreaders’ pronunciation, this is still the recommendation today, available to every BBC employee, whether staff or freelance, via their desktop. Nevertheless, yet again this morning, he has been interviewed live on Radio 4, and introduced as “KOHfi aNANN” by Edward Stourton. This is the man who when he first joined the BBC from ITN had us informed that as a linguist, he had no need of the help of the Pronunciation Research Unit, and could we please stop sending him notes! He is the only news presenter in my experience who ever behaved in this way. Most of them have always been delighted to have the responsibility taken off their hands.

It ill behoves a man whose own name is pronounced in an opaque manner (STURton, not as written) to believe that he can say anyone else’s name without help. The very fact that he could think of telling us he was a linguist and didn’t need help proved (a) that he is no linguist, and (b) that he needs lots of help.