No subject

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

On Jun 6, 2007, at 8:44 AM, Lary Urdang wrote:

> Give people literacy and the first thing they do is turn to
> spelling pronunciation.
>   Recently, I have heard albeit, alternative, and stalwart all
> pronounced with a first syllable rhyming with pal.

there is widespread variation in the pronunciation of syllable-final
orthographic AL.  how long has it been since we've had a discussion
here of words like FALCON?

i don't recall what the history is, or the distribution of the
variants, but i recall that both are complex.  analogy from word to
word is certainly an alternative hypothesis to spelling pronunciation.

> ...   And whence comes homage, a word borrowed and assimilated as
> HOM-ij or OM-ij, from 12th- or 13th-century French, made to rhyme
> with fromage?  What pretentious crap!

well, it might be pretentious, but surely what's going on here is the
use of the french word "hommage", with an approximation to the french
pronunciation.  (i think this usage is especially widespread in film
circles.)  the result is a doublet -- old nativized "homage" and new
frenchy "hommage".

>   These are all current in the speech of those who otherwise sound
> like native speakers of American English.  Now that we've taught
> them to read, maybe we can teach them to read a dictionary once in
> a while...

for them to look things up in a dictionary, they'd have to know
there's some reason to do so.  if they know that there's something
problematic about a pronunciation or word choice (or spelling, for
that matter), then they probably don't need the dictionary.  ordinary
people -- people who are not scholars of language -- are in something
of a bind here.

arnold

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