20. Pronunciation (Part-4)

Rhymes too tell us much. We know from Shakespeare's rhymes that knees,

grease, grass, and grace all rhymed (at least more or less) and that clean rhymed

with lane. (The modern pronunciation was evidently in use but considered

substandard.) Shakespeare also made puns suggesting a similar pronunciation

between food and ford and between reason and raising. The k in words like

knight and knave was still sounded in Shakespeare's day, while words like sea

and see were still pronounced slightly differently— sea being something roughly

halfway between see and say—as were other pairs involving ee and ea spellings,

such as peek and peak, seek and speak, and so on. All of this is of particular

interest to us because it was in this period that America began to be colonized, so

it was from this stock of pronunciations that American English grew. For this

reason, it has been said that Shakespeare probably sounded more American than English. Well, perhaps.

But in fact if he and his compatriots sounded like anything modern at all it was

more probably Irish, though even here there are so many exceptions as to make

such suggestions dubious.

For example, the Elizabethans, unlike modern English speakers, continued to

pronounce many er words as ar ones, rhyming serve with carve and convert with

depart. In England, some of these pronunciations survive, particularly in proper

nouns, such as Derby, Berkeley, and Berkshire, though there are many

exceptions and inconsistencies, as with the town of Berkamsted, Hertfordshire,

in which the first word is pronounced "birk-," but the second is pronounced

"hart-." It also survives in a very few everyday words in Britain, notably derby,

clerk, and—with an obviously modified spelling—heart, though not in jerk, kerb

(the English spelling of curb), nerve, serve, herd, heard, or almost any others of

the type. In America, it has been even more consistently abandoned and survives

only in heart. But the change is more recent than you might suppose. Well into

the nineteenth century, Noah Webster was still castigating those who would say

marcy for mercy and merchant for merchant. And then of course there's that

favorite word of Yosemite Sam's, varmint, which is simply a variant of vermin.

In both Britain and America the problem was sometimes resolved by changing

the spelling: Thus Hertford, Connecticut, became Hartford, while in Britain

Barclay and Carr became acceptable variants for Berkeley and Kerr. In at least

three instances this problem between "er" and "ar" pronunciation has left us with

modern doublets: person and parson, university and varsity, and perilous and

parlous.

It is probable, though less certain, that words such as herd, birth, hurt, and worse,

which all today carry an identical "er" sound—which, entirely incidentally, is a

sound that appears to be unique to English—had slightly different

pronunciations up to Shakespeare's day and perhaps beyond. All of these

pronunciation changes have continued up until fairly recent times. As late as the

fourth decade of the eighteenth century Alexander Pope was rhyming obey with

tea, ear with repair, give with believe, join with devine, and many others that jar

against modern ears. The poet William Cowper, who died in i800, was still able

to rhyme way with sea. July was widely pronounced "Julie" until about the same

time. Gold was pronounced "gould" until well into the nineteenth century (hence

the family name) and merchant was still often it marchant" long after Webster'sdeath.

Sometimes changes in pronunciation are rather more subtle and mysterious.

Consider, for example, changes in the stress on many of those words that can

function as either nouns or verbs—words like defect, reject, disguise, and so on.

Until about the time of Shakespeare all such words were stressed on the second

syllable.

But then three exceptions arose—outlaw, rebel, and record—in which the stress

moved to the first syllable when they were used as nouns (e.g., we re bel' against

a rebel; we re ject' a re'ject). As time went on, the number of words of this type was doubling every hundred years or so, going from 35 in 1700 to 70 in i800 and to 150 by this century,

spreading to include such words as object, subject, convict, and addict. Yet there

are still a thousand words which remain unaffected by this 400-year trend,

among them disdain, display, mistake, hollow, bother, and practice. Why should

this be? No one can say.

What is certain is that just as English spellings often tell us something about the

history of our words, so do some of our pronunciations, at least where French

terms are concerned. Words adopted from France before the seventeenth century

have almost invariably been anglicized, while those coming into the language

later usually retain a hint of Frenchness. Thus older ch-words have developed a

distinct "tch" sound as in change, charge, and chimney, while the newer words

retain the softer "sh" sound of champagne, chevron, chivalry, and chaperone.

Chef was borrowed twice into English, originally as chief with a hard ch and

later as chef with a soft ch. A similar tendency is seen in -age, the older forms of

which have been thoroughly anglicized into an "idge" sound (bandage, cabbage,

language) while the newer imports keep a Gallic "ozh" flavor (badinage,

camouflage). There has equally been a clear tendency to move the stress to the

first syllable of older adopted words, as with mutton, button, and baron, but not

with newer words such as balloon and cartoon. Presumably because of their

proximity to France (or, just as probably, because of their long disdain for things

French) the British have a somewhat greater tendency to disguise French

pronunciations, pronouncing garage as "garridge," fillet as "fill-ut," and putting

a clear first-syllable stress on café, buffet, ballet, and pâté. (Some Britons go so

far as to say "bully" and "bally.") Spelling and pronunciation in English are very

much like trains on parallel tracks, one sometimes racing ahead of the other before being caught up. An arresting example of this can be seen in the slow

evolution of verb forms in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that turned

hath into has and doth into does. Originally -th verbs were pronounced as

spelled. But for a generation or two during the period from (roughly) 1600 to

1650 they became pronounced as if spelled in the modern way, even when the

spelling was unaltered. So, for example, when Oliver Cromwell saw hath or

chooseth, he almost certainly read them as "has" or "chooses" despite their

spellings. Only later did the spellings catch up.