John Maidment has drawn attention to Richard Miles’ yodophobia. I mentioned his pronunciation of confines in my last post, but now, having watched all the series, I can give a list of some, frankly, astonishing pronunciations he has used in the course of the six-week series.

Tigris                       ˈtɪgrɪs

Chaldees                 ˈtʃældiːz

Levant                    ˈlevænt

Sennacherib         senətʃəˈrɪb   and   senætʃəˈrɪb

Boeotia                   bəʊˈiːʃə

Areopagus             ærɪəˈpɑːgəs

Seleucus                səˈluːsəs

monotheistic       mɒnəθəʊˈɪstɪk (twice, so it wasn’t a slip of the tongue)

coup de grace      ˈkuː də ˈgrɑː (no, I haven’t forgotten the final /s/)

As well as these, there was total inconsistency in the treatment of Greek names – Mycenae was anglicised to /maɪˈsiːni/, but Pylos, /ˈpiːlɒs/, was not, while Delos was: /ˈdiːlɒs/, leading me to wonder where he was talking about from time to time, as I could not immediately relate his pronunciation to either the Greek or anglicised version of the name. Thersites /θəˈsiːteɪz/ was given a more-Greek-like pronunciation, rather than /θəˈsaɪtiːz/, the normal anglicisation.

Darius was /ˈdærɪəs/ rather than /dəˈraɪəs/ and mementoes became /məʊˈmentəʊz/ – common pronunciations, but should we really expect to hear them from an eminent TV presenter?

I don’t think Richard Miles should shoulder all the blame – his producers, of whom there are at least four named in various capacities in the closing titles (Maria Powell, Melanie Archer, Tim Kirby, Eamonn Hardy) should have made certain that there was someone on hand to check for consistency – or is it assumed that an expert in one aspect of a subject is therefore expert in all its aspects, including language?

We’re all used to the phenomenon of nouns becoming differentiated from their homographic verbs by stress movement: dis’pute becoming ‘dispute for instance, and that this is happening despite the best efforts of the Queen’s English Society and its supporters. Now I’ve twice, from different speakers, in separate television programmes, heard the opposite happening.

Jeremy Burckardt, Lecturer in Rural History at the University of Reading, and Richard Miles, who teaches ancient history at the University of Sydney, but from whose accent appears to me to be British, both used the noun confines with clear second syllable stress.

How long before we have to admit this to our pronunciation dictionaries?

I’ve just bought a second-hand dictionary and thesaurus, which has a  contents list as follows:

“Abbreviations Used in this Book

Dictionary

Thesuarus

Appendices

Commonly Misspelt Words

Weights and Measures”

Strangely enough, “thesaurus” is not included in the list of Commonly Misspelt Words.

Simon Armitage is a poet who is now presenting TV documentaries, particularly on what might be called ‘poetic’ subjects. I have recently watched one on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and now one tracing the journey of Ulysses through Homer’s Odyssey. I was surprised that he seemed to know so little about Greek pronunciation, or at least the traditional treatment of Greek names in English, especially as he has produced a verse translation of some of the Odyssey.

Names I spotted were Acheron /əˈkɛərɒn/, Charybdis /ʃəˈrɪbdɪs/, Ogygia /ɒʤɪˈʤɪə/ and a place I don’t recognise: /ˈʃerɪə/. Can anyone identify this one? If /k/ in Acheron, why not in Charybdis? I know that while chiropractor is always(?) /k-/, chiropody is often /ʃ-/, but still …

Still watching TV programmes that I’ve previously recorded, I’ve just caught up with two episodes of the BBC series on the Pre-Raphaelites. One of the experts used in the programmes was Alison Smith, Curator at Tate Britain. She had two unusual pronunciations, one remarkable for not being consistent. She used the word audacious four times in the first of the series. On the first three occasions, her pronunciation was as one would expect: /ɔːˈdeɪʃəs/, but then the fourth time it came out as /aʊˈdeɪʃəs/. Can this have been a simple slip of the tongue? Her other unusual pronunciation was visceral, /ˈvɪskərəl/. This I put down to her having learned it as a written word, one she is not used to hearing pronounced.

The narrator of the series, the well-known actor Nigel Planer, had in his script the word burgeoning, and he chose to make the second consonant a fricative: /ˈbɜːʒənɪŋ/, rather than an affricate: /ˈbɜːʤənɪŋ/. I begin to wonder if the affricate /ʤ/ is losing ground in English except in initial position – so that only those few places where /ʤ/ and /ʒ/ make minimal pairs (such as leisure, ledger in British English) will manage to hold on to the /ʤ/.

I’ve written before about the pronunciation of nuptial and haven’t got much to add, except that a couple of weeks ago, the word was much in the news when the British courts were asked to decide on the legality of a pre-nuptial agreement.

Not a single person I heard use the word, on radio or TV, whether journalist, presenter or interviewee, used any pronunciation other than /ˈnʌptʃəl/. This is given as the second pronunciation in all the current pronunciation dictionaries. Is it time to promote it to first place?

Further to my post on antagonist pronounced /ænˈtædʒənɪst/, which Jack Windsor Lewis so ably expanded here, there is one word where the letter sequence -go- is invariably pronounced with /dʒ/ rather than /g/: mortgagor. The alternative spelling mortgager has been used sporadically since the 17th century, and there is also mor(t)gageour from earlier centuries, but it is odd that -or, rather than -er, has prevailed as the standard spelling when this results in so clear a contradiction to the normal representation of /dʒ/.

Sportsmen – and I suppose sportswomen as well – are often given nicknames by their team mates. For instance, Andrew Flintoff became “Freddy” because of the similarity of his surname to “Flintstone”. The most unimaginative of these is simply to add ‘-y’ at the end of the name, as in Jimmy Greaves becoming “Greavesy’ (”Saint and Greavesy”, “Saint” being Ian St. John, were a double act of TV football pundits).

It’s interesting, therefore, that when you get a footballer whose name actually ends in ‘-y’ (and is pronounced /-i/), the nickname involves removing that syllable. Rooney becomes “Roo”.

In last week’s In Our Time, (Radio 4, Thursday 14 October) one of Melvyn Bragg’s guests was Tim Blanning, Emeritus Professor of Modern European History at Cambridge University The discussion was about the Sturm und Drang movement in 18th Century Germany.

In the course of the programme, Professor Blanning used the word protagonists, but he pronounced it /prəˈtædʒənɪsts/. I wonder if he also says /ænˈtædʒənaɪz/ and /ænˈtædʒənɪst/. This is a pronunciation not given by any of the current pronunciation dictionaries, but I wonder if, being an eminent scholar, he is setting a trend for the future?

I’ve been reading “The World of Words” by Eric Partridge (published by Routledge, 1938). In Chapter 2, entitled “The English Language” – chapter 3 is “The American Language” – he draws largely on Otto Jespersen’s Growth and Structure of the English Language, quoting often, and sometimes not acknowledging the source directly. On page 68, we find the following paragraph:

The Puritans influenced the language by causing a diminution both of swearing as a habit and of the number of oaths: whence Law (or Lawks) for Lord, drat it, and goodness gracious. ‘The English swear less than other European nations and … when they do swear the expressions are more innocent than elsewhere.’ Thus it is to the Puritans, or rather to their lingering influence, that we owe a certain number of English euphemisms – mild words for strong words. Why, it is even customary to speak of oaths as expletives or profane language! ‘Where a French or German or Scandinavian lady will express surprise or a little fright by exclaiming (My) God!, an Englishwoman will say Dear me! or Oh my! or Good gracious!‘ Euphemism reached its height of prudery and ludicrousness in the period 1840-70, when, in England, trousers were called by many comic names of the unmentionables kind and, in America, the ladies spoke of the limbs of a piano. ‘Prudery is an exaggeration, but purity is a virtue, and there can be no doubt that the speech of the average Englishman is less tainted with indecencies … than that of the average Continental.’

Can this be true? I know that when I was a student working in a factory, the men would not swear in front of the women, although the women were as hard-swearing as the men amongst themselves. What sort of people did Jespersen (and Partridge, for that matter) mix with? Perhaps language was milder in in the 1930s, or perhaps Jespersen, as a foreigner, was spoken to rather deferentially by the ‘natives’. Whatever, I cannot believe that the position is still the same today. If it is, then the profanity of ‘Continentals’ must be something quite amazing.

Dr Jonathan Foyle, presenting a BBC 4 TV programme on the public buildings of the north of England, repeatedly pronounced the Athenaeum in Liverpool as /æθəˈneɪəm/, although his interviewees, members of the club, used the more anglicized /æθəˈniːəm/. I attributed this to a knowledge of Latin, but wondered whether he also pronounced aesthetic with /eɪ/, or treated stressed and unstressed occurrences of ae differently. Would he also pronounce Julius Caesar as /ˈseɪzə/? However, he then had to talk about other buildings with the same name being erected in other northern cities, and used a plural /æθəˈneɪaɪ/. Has my knowledge of Latin been totally lost, or should the Latin plural of Athenaeum not be Athenaea? And what is wrong with Athenaeums?  If I am right, then Dr Foyle’s pronunciation of the singular is not based on a true knowledge of Latin, but on a pseudo-knowledge which also demonstrates a shaky understanding of the usual development in English of the Latin ae.