The first c in arctic

[Beverly Flanigan]

Thanks for the history, Mike!  BTW, when I taught high school long long ago
I too taught a simplified IPA.  I also played that Chaucer record
(record!), as well as Shakespeare, Robert Frost, T.S. Eliot....  Wonderful
recordings!


At 04:01 AM 10/6/99 -0500, you wrote:
>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 !!!
>