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Spelling pronunciation
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A spelling pronunciation is a pronunciation that, instead of reflecting the way the word was pronounced by previous generations of speakers, is a rendering in sound of the word's spelling. Spelling pronunciations compete, often effectively, with the older traditional pronunciation.
Spelling pronunciation vs. analogical pronunciationIn some cases, we cannot tell if a pronunciation is a true spelling pronunciation. The alternative is that a word is being pronounced analogically, in essence as the "sum of its parts". Thus, forehead is commonly pronounced as a sequence of fore plus head, instead of the historically earlier "forrid"; and waistcoat is commonly pronounced as a sequence of waist and coat, instead of the historically earlier "weskit".
Analogy in this sense (also known as recomposition) can be confused with reanalysis. For example, inmost comes from Old English innemest, which contained the ordinary superlative suffix -est. The later switch to in + most was due to reanalysis of -mest as -most (and led to the creation of a whole family of words of relational meaning: northernmost, outermost, uppermost, etc. Foremost is unusual in this group in having much the same history as inmost, being from OE fyremest, superlative of the word giving modern English former).
Opinions about spelling pronunciationSpelling pronunciations give rise to varied opinions. Often those who retain the old pronunciation consider the spelling pronunciation to be a mark of ignorance or insecurity. Those who use a spelling pronunciation may not be aware that it is one, and consider the historically authentic version to be slovenly, since it "slurs over" a letter. Conversely, the users of some careless, but not historically deep-rooted, pronunciations such as "Febuary" (for February) may regard the historically (and phonetically) authentic version as a pedantic spelling pronunciation.
Fowler reports that in his day there was a conscious movement among schoolteachers and others encouraging people to abandon anomalous traditional pronunciations and "speak as you spell".
Others would argue that this trend, though understandable from a socio-psychological point of view, is, from a strictly linguistic perspective, irrational, since writing was invented to represent the sounds of the language and not vice versa. According to this belief, there is no good reason to "speak as one spells", but there are many good reasons to "spell as one speaks", i.e. to reform the orthography of a language whenever it does not render its pronunciation clearly and unambiguously – which is the task of a writing system. How easy such a reform would be in practice is of course quite another matter.
A different variety of spelling pronunciations are phonetic adaptations, i.e. pronunciations of the written form of foreign words within the frame of the phonematic system of the language that accepts them: an example of this process is garage sometimes pronounced as ['gæ???] in English. Such adaptations are quite natural, and often preferred by speech-conscious and careful speakers.
Spelling pronunciations in children and foreignersChildren who read a great deal often produce spelling pronunciations, since they have no way of knowing, other than the spelling, how the rare words they encounter are correctly pronounced. Thoughtful parents usually try to correct such children's errors gently. But as this can never extend to every instance, and there are many words which one reads far more often than one hears, what is a spelling pronunciation in one generation often becomes standard in the next.
Well-read second language learners are likewise vulnerable to producing spelling pronunciations.
In other languagesIn French, the first vowel in oignon (onion) is, anomalously, , where general principles would lead one to expect . The reason is that the spelling of this word is a holdover from the 17th century, when "i" was invariably inserted before "gn": montagne was spelled "montaigne", but pronounced in the same way as today. However, there are provincial school-teachers who insist on pronouncing oignon with a . (The French Academy has recently (1975) decreed an official change in spelling to ognon.)
When English club was first borrowed into French, the approved pronunciation was /klab/, as being a reasonable approximation of the English. Now the standard is /klyb/ (Littré, though Larousse and Oxford prefer /klœb/), on the basis of the spelling. Similarly, shampooing "product for washing the hair" at the time of borrowing was ; now it's
In Hebrew there is a vowel called patach genuvah, consisting of an "a" sign placed underneath a final guttural but pronounced before it: an example is ruach, which looks as if it ought to be *rucha. Where the final consonant is a sounded he (h), many speakers do indeed place the vowel after it, mistakenly pronouncing Eloah (God) as "Eloha" and gavoah (high) as "gavoha". Other examples of spelling pronunciations are the Sephardic "kal" and "tsahorayim": see Sephardic Hebrew language.
Books- See the index entries under "spelling pronunciation" from Leonard Bloomfield, Language (originally published 1933; current edition 1984, University of Chicago Press, Chicago; ISBN 81-208-1195-X).
- Most of the etymologies and spelling histories above are taken from the Oxford English Dictionary.
See also
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