The first c in arctic

[Mike Salovesh]

My picture of "proper" pronunciation for arctic goes back to my 8th
grade English teacher, who did all kinds of things that probably don't
surface in eighth grade nowadays.  Her class included my first serious
exposure to IPA, for example.  She also played recorded excerpts of a
linguist reading Chaucer "played on the original instruments", as it
were. . .  and asked us to read Chaucer in a non-modernized edition.

I think it was reading Chaucer that brought up the question of how we
spell "arctic".  Chaucer has it "artic", and OED cites a clear trail to
Old French "artique" and Latin "articus".

Our teacher attributed the first "c" in "arctic" to an overeager
lexicographer, probably in the 17th century, who took a stab at
inventing an etymology with no evidence behind it. The lexicographer
(could it have been Johnson himself?) guessed that the word was a
reference to the North Star in Ursa Major, and he mistakenly went back
to the Greek word for bear for his etymon, bringing it through an
alleged Latin *arcticus, meaning bear.  He fit his spelling to his
etymology.  The pronounced first "c", our teacher alleged, is simply a
back-formation that started as a spelling pronunciation.  (Cf. the note
in OED that obsolete "artic" was refashioned to "arctic" after 1700;
they cite a 1706 "arctik" and the modern spelling ca. 1774, in Cook's
Voyages.)

That story of an intrusive "c" in "arctic" leading to a prononced /k/
where it didn't belong got firmly filed away in my head as "common
knowledge".  I didn't realize how UNcommon it was for anyone to learn
what that English teacher gave us in eighth grade until I took my first
linguistics course a dozen years later.

-- mike salovesh          <salovesh at niu.edu>                PEACE !!!