The Mother Tongue (13 page)

Finally, but no less importantly, English possesses the ability to make new words by fusing compounds—
airport, seashore, footwear, wristwatch, landmark, flowerpot,
and so on almost endlessly. All Indo-European languages have the capacity to form compounds. Indeed, German and Dutch do it, one might say, to excess. But English does it more neatly than most other languages, eschewing the choking word chains that bedevil other Germanic languages and employing the nifty refinement of making the elements reversible, so that we can distinguish between a houseboat and a boathouse, between basketwork and a workbasket, between a casebook and a bookcase. Other languages lack this facility.

6.

Pronunciation

W
hat is the most common vowel sound in English? Would you say it is the
o
of
hot,
the
a
of
cat,
the
e
of
red,
the
i
of
in,
the
u
of
up
? In fact, it is none of these. It isn't even a standard vowel sound. It is the colorless murmur of the schwa, represented by the symbol [ə] and appearing as one or more of the vowel sounds in words without number. It is the sound of
i
in
animal,
of
e
in
enough,
of the middle
o
in
orthodox,
of the second, fourth, fifth, and sixth vowels in
inspirational,
and of at least one of the vowels in almost every multisyllabic word in the language. It is everywhere.

This reliance of ours on one drab phoneme is a little odd when you consider that English contains as lush a mixture of phonics as any language in the world. We may think we're pretty tame when we encounter such tongue twisters as the Czech
vrch pln mlh
(meaning “a hill in the fog”) or Gaelic agglomerations like
pwy ydych chi
(Welsh for “how are you?”), but on the other hand, we possess a number of sounds that other languages find treacherous and daunting, most notably the “th” sound of
the
and
think,
which is remarkably rare in the world at large, or the “l” sound that Orientals find so deeply impossible. (I once worked with a Chinese fellow in England who when things went wrong would mutter darkly, “Bruddy hairo!” which I took to be some ancient Cantonese invective; it was not until many months later that I realized he was just saying, “Bloody hell.”)

If there is one thing certain about English pronunciation it is that there is almost nothing certain about it. No other language in the world has more words spelled the same way and yet pronounced differently. Consider just a few:

In some languages, such as Finnish, there is a neat one-to-one correspondence between sound and spelling. A
k
to the Finns is always “k,” an
l
eternally and comfortingly “l.” But in English, pronunciation is so various—one might almost say random—that not one of our twenty-six letters can be relied on for constancy. Either they clasp to themselves a variety of pronunciations, as with the
c
in
race, rack,
and
rich,
or they sulk in silence, like the
b
in
debt,
the
a
in
bread,
the second
t
in
thistle.
In combinations they become even more unruly and unpredictable, most famously in the letter cluster
ough,
which can be pronounced in any of eight ways—as in
through, though, thought, tough, plough, thorough, hiccough,
and
lough
(an Irish-English word for lake or loch, pronounced roughly as the latter). The pronunciation possibilities are so various that probably not one English speaker in a hundred could pronounce with confidence the name of a crowlike bird called the chough. (It's chuff.) Two words in English,
hegemony
and
phthisis,
have nine pronunciations each. But perhaps nothing speaks more clearly for the absurdities of English pronunciation than that the word for the study of pronunciation in English,
orthoepy,
can itself be pronounced two ways.

Every language has its quirks and all languages, for whatever reason, happily accept conventions and limitations that aren't necessarily called for. In English, for example, we don't have words like
fwost
or
zpink
or
abtholve
because we never normally combine those letters to make those sounds, though there's no reason why we couldn't if we wanted to. We just don't. Chinese takes this matter of self-denial to extremes, particularly in the variety of the language spoken in the capital, Peking. All Chinese dialects are monosyllabic—which can itself be almost absurdly limiting—but the Pekingese dialect goes a step further and demands that all words end in an “n” or “ng” sound. As a result, there are so few phonetic possibilities in Pekingese that each sound must represent on average seventy words. Just one sound, “yi,” can stand for 215 separate words. Partly the Chinese get around this by using rising or falling pitches to vary the sounds fractionally, but even so in some dialects a falling “i” can still represent almost forty unrelated words. We use pitch in English to a small extent, as when we differentiate between “oh” and “oh?” and “oh!” but essentially we function by relying on a pleasingly diverse range of sounds.

Almost everyone agrees that English possesses more sounds than almost any other language, though few agree on just how many sounds that might be. The British authority Simeon Potter says there are forty-four distinct sounds—twelve vowels, nine diphthongs (a kind of gliding vowel), and twenty-three consonants. The International Phonetic Alphabet, perhaps the most widely used, differentiates between fifty-two sounds used in English, divided equally between consonants and vowels, while the
American Heritage Dictionary
lists forty-five for purely English sounds, plus a further half dozen for foreign terms. Italian, by contrast, uses only about half as many sounds, a mere twenty-seven, while Hawaiian gets by with just thirteen. So whether the number in English is forty-four or fifty-two or something in between, it is quite a lot. But having said that, if you listen carefully, you will find that there are many more than this.

The combination “ng,” for example, is usually treated as one discrete sound, as in
bring
and
sing.
But in fact we make two sounds with it—employing a soft “g” with
singer
and a hard “g” with
finger.
We also tend to vary its duration, giving it fractionally more resonance in descriptive or onomatopoeic words like
zing
and
bong
and rather less in mundane words like
something
and
rang.
We make another unconscious distinction between the hard “th” of
those
and the soft one of
thought.
Some dictionaries fail to note this distinction and yet it makes all the difference between
mouth
as a noun and
mouth
as a verb, and between the noun
thigh
and the adjective
thy.
More subtly still, when we use a “k” sound at the start of a word, we put a tiny puff of breath behind it (as in
kitchen
and
conquer
) but when the “k” follows an
s
(as in
skill
or
skid
) we withhold the puff. When we make an everyday observation like “I have some homework to do,” we pronounce the word “hav.” But when we become emphatic about it—“I
have
to go now”—we pronounce it “haff.”

Each time we speak we make a multitude of such fractional adjustments, most of which we are wholly unaware of. But these only begin to hint at the complexity of our phonetics. An analysis of speech at the Bell Telephone Laboratories by Dr. John R. Pierce detected more than ninety separate sounds just for the letter
t.

We pronounce many words—perhaps most—in ways that are considerably at variance with the ways they are spelled and often even more so with the ways we
think
we are saying them. We may believe we say “later” but in fact we say “lader.” We may think we say “ladies,” but it's more probably “laties” or even, in the middle of a busy sentence, “lays.”
Handbag
comes out as “hambag.” We think we say “butter,” but it's really “budder” or “buddah” or even “bu'r.” We see
wash,
but say “worsh.” We think we say “granted,” but really say “grannid.” No one says “looked.” It's “lookt.” “I'll just get her” becomes “aldges gedder.” We constantly allow sounds to creep into words where they have no real business. We introduce a “p” between “m” and “t” or “m” and “s” sounds, so that we really say “warmpth” and “somepthing.” We can't help ourselves. We similarly put a “t” between “n” and “s” sounds, which is why it is nearly impossible for us to distinguish between
mints
and
mince
or between
prints
and
prince.
Occasionally these intruders become established in the spellings.
Glimpse
(coming from the same source as
gleam
) was originally
glimsen,
with no “p,” but the curious desire to put one there proved irresistible over time.
Thunder
originally had no “d” (German
donner
still doesn't) and
stand
had no “n.” One was added to
stand,
but not, oddly, to
stood. Messenger
never had an “n” (
message
still doesn't),
pageant
never had a “t,” and
sound
no “d.”

We tend to slur those things most familiar to us, particularly place-names. Australians will tell you they come from “Stralia,” while Torontoans will tell you they come from “Tronna.” In Iowa it's “Iwa” and in Ohio it's “Hia.” People from Milwaukee say they're from “Mwawkee.” In Louisville it's “Loovul,” in Newark it's “Nerk,” and in Indianapolis it's “Naplus.” People in Philadelphia don't come from there; they come from “Fuhluffia.” The amount of slurring depends on the degree of familiarity and frequency with which the word is spoken. The process is well illustrated by the street in London called Marylebone Road. Visitors from abroad often misread it as “Marleybone.” Provincial Britons tend to give it its full phonetic value: “Mary-luh-bone.” Londoners are inclined to slur it to “Mairbun” or something similar while those who live or work along it slur it even further to something not far off “Mbn.”

For the record, when bits are nicked off the front end of words it's called
aphesis,
when off the back it's called
apocope,
and when from the middle it's
syncope.
A somewhat extreme example of the process is the naval shortening of
forecastle
to
fo'c'sle,
but the tendency to compress is as old as language itself.
Daisy
was once
day's eye, good-bye
was
God-be-with-you, hello
was (possibly)
whole-be-thou, shepherd
was
sheep herd, lord
was
loafward, every
was
everich, fortnight
(a word curiously neglected in America) was
fourteen-night.

The British, who are noted for their clipped diction, are particularly good at lopping syllables off words as if with a sword, turning
immediately
into “meejutly,”
necessary
into “nessree,”
library
into “libree.” The process was brought to a kind of glorious consummation with a word that is now all but dead—
halfpennyworth.
With the disappearance in the 1980s of the halfpenny (itself neatly hacked down in spoken British to
hapenee
), the English are now denied the rich satisfaction of compressing
halfpennyworth
into
haypth.
They must instead content themselves with giving their place-names a squeeze—turning Barnoldswick into “Barlick,” Wymondham into “Windum,” Cholmondeston into “Chumson.” (Of which much more in Chapter 13.)

We Americans like to think our diction more precise. To be sure, we do give full value to each syllable in words like
necessary, immediate, dignatory, lavatory,
and (very nearly)
laboratory.
On the other hand, we more freely admit a dead schwa into
-ile
words such as
fragile, hostile,
and
mobile
(though not, perversely, into
infantile
and
mercantile
) where the British are, by contrast, scrupulously phonetic. And both of us, I would submit, are equally prone to slur phrases—though not necessarily the same ones. Where the British will say
howjado
for “how do you do,” an American will say
jeetjet
for “have you taken sustenance recently?” and
lesskweet
for “in that case, let us retire to a convivial place for a spot of refreshment.”