The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way

6. Pronunciation

What 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:

heard

—

beard

road

—

broad

five

—

give

fillet

—

skillet

early

—

dearly

beau

—

beauty

steak

—

streak

ache

—

mustache

low

—

how

doll

—

droll

scour

—

four

four

—

tour

grieve

—

sieve

paid

—

said

break

—

speak

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.”

This tendency to compress and mangle words was first formally noted in a 1949 New Yorker article by one John Davenport who gave it the happy name of Slurvian. In American English, Slurvian perhaps reaches its pinnacle in Baltimore, a city whose citizens have long had a particular gift for chewing up the most important vowels, consonants, and even syllables of most words and converting them into a kind of verbal compost, to put it in the most charitable terms possible. In Baltimore (pronounced Balamer), an eagle is an “iggle,” a tiger is a “tagger,” water is “wooder,” a power mower is a “paramour,” a store is a “stewer,” clothes are “clays,” orange juice is “arnjoos,” a bureau is a “beero,” and the Orals are of course the local baseball team. Whole glossaries have been composed to help outsiders interpret these and the many hundreds of other terms that in Baltimore pass for English. Baltimoreans may be masters at this particular art, but it is one practiced to a greater or lesser degree by people everywhere.

All of this is by way of coming around to the somewhat paradoxical observation that we speak with remarkable laxness and imprecision and yet manage to express ourselves with wondrous subtlety—and simply breathtaking speed. In normal conversation we speak at a rate of about 300 syllables a minute. To do this we force air up through the larynx—or supralaryngeal vocal tract, to be technical about it—and, by variously pursing our lips and flapping our tongue around in our mouth rather in the manner of a freshly landed fish, we shape each passing puff of air into a series of loosely differentiated plosives, fricatives, gutturals, and other minor atmospheric disturbances. These emerge as a more or less continuous blur of sound. People don’t talk like this, theytalklikethis. Syllables, words, sentences run together like a watercolor left in the rain. To understand what anyone is saying to us we must separate these noises into words and the words into sentences so that we might in our turn issue a stream of mixed sounds in response. If what we say is suitably apt and amusing, the listener will show his delight by emitting a series of uncontrolled high-pitched noises, accompanied by sharp intakes of breath of the sort normally associated with a seizure or heart failure. And by these means we converse. Talking, when you think about it, is a very strange business indeed.

And yet we achieve the process effortlessly. We absorb and interpret spoken sounds more or less instantaneously. If I say to you, “Which do you like better, peas or carrots?” it will take you on average less than a fifth of a second—the length of an eye blink—to interpret the question, consider the relative merits of the two vegetables, and formulate a reply. We repeat this process hundreds of times a day, generally with such speed that often we have our answer ready before the person has even finished the question.

As listeners we can distinguish between the most subtle gradations of emphasis. Most people, if they are reasonably attentive, can clearly detect the difference between that’s tough and that stuff, between I love you and isle of view, and between gray day and Grade A even though the phonics could hardly be more similar. Sometimes, however, precise diction proves elusive, particularly when there is no direct eye contact. (It is remarkable the extent to which we read lips—or at least facial expressions.) Every newspaper person has his or her favorite story involving slipups resulting from misheard dictation. I remember once while working on an evening newspaper in southern England receiving a wire service story that made absolutely no sense until a correction was sent a few minutes later saying: “In the preceding story, for ‘Crewe Station’ read ‘crustacean.’ ” In a similar way, pilots long had difficulty in distinguishing between five and nine until someone thought to start using the more distinct fiver and niner. Germans, suffering a similar problem with zwei and drei, introduced the nonce word zwo, for two, to deal with such misunderstandings.

Despite these occasional drawbacks, listening is something we do remarkably well. Speech, by contrast, is a highly inefficient process. We are all familiar with the feeling of not being able to get the words out fast enough, of mixing up sounds into spoonerisms, of stumbling over phonetically demanding words like statistics and proprietorial. The fact is that we will never be able to speak as quickly as we can hear.

Hence the tendency to slur. There has been a clear trend over time to make our pronunciations less precise, to let letters lapse into silence or allow sounds to merge and become less emphatic. This happened with -ed endings. In Chaucer’s day, helped was pronounced not “helpt” but “hel-pud,” with the two syllables clearly enunciated. By Shakespeare’s time, poets could choose between the two to suit their cadence—writing helped to indicate the historic pronunciation or help’d to signify the modern one.

Such pronunciation changes are a regular feature of language. Sometimes they occur with the speed of centuries, sometimes with seemingly hell-for-leather haste. They appear from time to time in all languages for reasons that no one really understands. German had one not long after the departure of the Angles and Saxons to Britain, which resulted in the division of German into High and Low varieties. In the German shift, northern speakers came to place s’s where before they had put t’s, and to put f’s where previously they had employed p’s. These changes were of course too late to affect English, and thus explain the differences in many modern English and German words, such as water and wasser and open and offen. Such changes are by no means unique to English or even the Germanic languages. Latin underwent a prolonged series of changes. In the fourth century, to take one example, the Latin centum (hundred) began to be pronounced in various ways—a fact reflected in the modern French cent, “sent,” Spanish ciento, “thiento,” and Italian cento, “chento.” By such means did the Romance languages grow.

In England the Great Vowel Shift, as it is generally and somewhat misleadingly called, happened later, roughly around the time of Chaucer. Textbook discussions of the shift can sometimes leave us with the impression that people pronounced their vowels in one way up to a certain date and then suddenly, as if on a whim, began pronouncing them in an altogether different way. But of course it was never as simple as that. Many of the pronunciation changes reflected changes that had begun centuries before in the time of King Alfred and some of them are not complete to this day. (Shove and move may one day be pronounced in the same way; it would make sense.) So, although it is true to say that these constituted some of the most sudden and dramatic changes English had ever undergone, we should not lose sight of the fact that we are talking about a period that spanned, even at its most rapid, a couple of generations. When Chaucer died in 1400, people still pronounced the e on the end of words. One hundred years later not only had it become silent, but scholars were evidently unaware that it ever had been pronounced. In short, changes that seem to history to have been almost breathtakingly sudden will often have gone unnoticed by those who lived through them.

No one knows why this vowel shift happened. As Charlton Laird has succinctly put it: “For some reason, Englishmen started shoving tense vowels forward in their mouths. Then they stopped. And they have remained stopped. Nobody knows why they started or why they stopped.” For whatever reasons, in a relatively short period the long vowel sounds of English (or tense vowels as Laird called them) changed their values in a fundamental and seemingly systematic way, each of them moving forward and upward in the mouth. There was evidently a chain reaction in which each shifting vowel pushed the next one forward: The “o” sound of spot became the “a” sound of spat, while spat became speet, speet became spate, and so on. The “aw” sound of law became the “oh” sound of close, which in turn became the “oo” sound of food. Chaucer’s lyf, pronounced “leef,” became Shakespeare’s life, pronounced “lafe,” became our life. Not all vowels were affected. The short e of bed and the short i of sit, for instance, were unmoved, so that we pronounce those words today just as the Venerable Bede said them 1,200 years ago.

There were other changes as well—most notably the loss of the Old English sound x, the throat-clearing sound of the ch in the Scottish loch or the German ach. The loss of this sound from English meant that others rushed to fill the vacuum, as in the Old English word burh (place), which became variously burgh as in Edinburgh, borough as in Gainsborough, brough as in Middlesbrough, and bury as in Canterbury.

Before the shift house was pronounced “hoose” (it still is in Scotland), mode was pronounced “mood,” and home rhymed with “gloom,” which is why Domesday Book is pronounced and sometimes called Doomsday. (The word has nothing to do with the modern word doom, incidentally. It is related to the domes- in domestic.) But as with most things, shifting vowel sounds were somewhat hit or miss, often because regional variations disrupted the pattern. This is most notably demonstrated with the “oo” sound. In Chaucer’s day in London, all double o words were pronounced to rhyme with the modern word food. But once the pattern was broken, all kinds of other variations took hold, giving us such anomalies as blood, stood, good, flood, and so on. Most of these words were pronounced in different ways by different people from different places until they gradually settled into their modern forms, although some have never truly settled, such as roof and poof, which some people rhyme with goof and others pronounce with the sound in foot. A similar drift with “ove” accounts for the different sounds of shove, move, and hove.

Since obviously there is no one around who heard English as it was spoken in the time of Chaucer and Caxton, how do we know all this? The answer is that for the most part we cannot know for sure. Most of it is based on supposition. But scholars can get a good idea of what English must have sounded like by looking at the rhymes and rhythms of historic verse and by examining the way words were spelled in letters and other snatches of informal writing. In this respect we owe a huge debt to bad spellers. It is from misspellings in letters of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries that we can be pretty certain that boiled was pronounced byled, that join was gine, that merchant was marchant, and so on. From the misspellings of Queen Elizabeth we know that work was once pronounced “wark,” person was “parson,” heard was “hard,” and defer was “defar,” at least at court [cited by Lincoln Barnett, page 175]. In the same period, short vowels were often used interchangeably, so that not was sometimes written nat and when sometimes appeared as whan. Relics of this variability include strap and strop, taffy and toffy, God and gad.

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 marchant 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 1800, 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 “marchant” long after Webster’s death.

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 reb′el; we re ject′ a re′ject). As time went on, according to Aitchison [Language Change, page 96], the number of words of this type was doubling every hundred years or so, going from 35 in 1700 to 70 in 1800 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 (bodinage, 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 “buffy” 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 [cited by Jespersen, page 213].

Often, however, the process has worked the other way around, with pronunciation following spelling. We will see how the changes of spelling in words like descrive/describe and parfet/perfect resulted in changes in pronunciation, but many other words have been similarly influenced. Atone was once pronounced “at one” (the term from which it sprang), while atonement was “at one-ment.” Many people today pronounce the t in often because it’s there (even though they would never think to do it with soften, fasten, or hasten) and I suspect that a majority of people would be surprised to learn that the correct (or at least historic) pronunciation of waistcoat is “wess-kit,” of victuals is “vittles,” of forehead is “forrid,” and of comptroller is “controller” (the one is simply a fancified spelling of the other). In all of these the sway of spelling is gradually proving irresistible.

Quite a few of these spelling-induced pronunciation changes are surprisingly recent. At the time of the American Revolution, husband was pronounced “husban,” soldier was “sojur,” and pavement was “payment,” according to Burchfield [page 41]. Until well into the nineteenth century, zebra was pronounced “zebber,” chemist was “kimmist,” and Negro, despite its spelling, was “negger” (hence the insulting term nigger). Burchfield goes on to point out that until the nineteenth century swore was spoken with a silent w (as sword still is) as were Edward and upward, giving “Ed′ard” and “up′ard.”

Much of this would seem to fly in the face—indeed, does fly in the face—of what we were saying earlier, namely that pronounciations tend to become slurred over time. Although that is generally true, there are constant exceptions. Language, never forget, is more fashion than science, and matters of usage, spelling, and pronunciation tend to wander around like hemlines. People say things sometimes because they are easier or more sensible, but sometimes simply because that’s the way everyone else is saying them. Bounteous, for instance, was in Noah Webster’s day pronounced “bountchus”—a clear case of evolutionary slurring—but for some reason purists took exception to it and bountchus quickly became a mark of ignorance. It is for the same reason precisely that in modern England it is considered more refined to pronounce ate as “et.”

But without doubt the most remarkable example of pronunciation change arising purely as a whim of fashion was the sudden tendency in eighteenth-century upper-class southern England to pronounce words like dance, bath, and castle with a broad a, as if they were spelled dahnce, bahth, and cahstle. In the normal course of things, we might have expected the pronunciations to drift back. But for some reason they stuck (at least they have so far), helping to underscore the social, cultural, and orthoepic differences between not only Britons and Americans but even between Britons and Britons. The change was so consequential and far-reaching that it is not so much a matter of pronunciation as of dialect. And that rather neatly takes us to the topic of our next chapter.