To start with, I humbly ask the reader to pronounce these two words out aloud. If you’re not sure, do your best: victuals, island.
Within the realm of science/atheist/philosophy blogosphere, spelling and grammar pedantry abounds. I’ve found the stereotype of the hyper-intellectual nitpicker to be at times accurate in comments of the blogs I read. And I must admit, I have my pet peeves too. If you use “your” when you mean “you’re”, your worthy of mockery of a most severe kind.
However I am pretty wary of prescriptivism (maybe majoring in linguistics as an undegrad had something to do with it). Prescriptivists can be quite authoritarian, especially those who believe there is some almost Platonic ideal for a word that indicates its “correct” usage. This tends to be a problem when the usage proclaimed “correct” is very different to “actual” use, as if there can be a difference.
The two words given above are a perfect example, and they share a very similar story. I assume even if English isn’t your first language you’d know the second is pronounced with a silent s. But the first word has a silent c, as you would have deduced from the title. Yes, bizarrely, it’s pronounced vittles. Here’s why.
To take the island example first, the word comes from the Old English egland. The g had a y sound in Old English. However in the 15th century, spelling pedants wanted to make sure every English word reflects its proper history. Because Latin was the language of the learned (and for other reasons, I presume), they thought it came from the Latin isle (from which we derive English words of slightly-related meanings like insular and probably penninsula). Trouble was the unwashed masses weren’t pronouncing the s! No worries, we’ll stick it in as a reminder of our Great Latin HeritageTM
The victuals example is a bit better in that at least they didn’t stuff it up. It really does come from the Latin victualia meaning provisions. However Old French (which like modern French seemed to have a problem with too many consonants in a row) dropped the c and made it vitaille. English gets the word from Old French and so it was written vitaylle (and relates to other similar English phrases like your “vital signs”). Once again, the pedants wanted a connection to Latin and again inserted a silent c as a stern reminder for the boors to be less boorish.
These almost-identical examples illustrate most of the problems with viewing word meaning and word etymology as something handed down from on high. The changes introduced silent letters to point to a Latin connection. This was wrong in one case but either way, the only benefit was for scholars who would have known this anyway. They got to do a prescriptivist circle-jerk whilst for most people the changes would have been puzzling. And because of the conservatism of English, as driven by modern language pedants, the words have still not been fixed making two jarring barriers to literacy.
8 comments ↓
The “victuals” example is fascinating! I confess I had to check that the word exists in English. Do you happen to know why “indict” is pronounced the way it is? I can’t think of any other word ending in -ict that is pronounced alike.
I also admit that when I read sentences like “may I borrow you’re book?” or “I think your an intellectual” I get upset. It signifies some deep ignorance from the part of the writer.
Fancy that: The word “indict” has the same “sad” story as “victuals”:
c.1300, from Anglo-Fr. enditer “accuse, indict” (late 13c.), from O.Fr. enditer “to dictate or inform,” from M.L. indictare “to declare, proclaim in writing,” from L. in- “in” + dictare “to say, compose in words” (see dictate). Retained its French pronunciation even after the spelling was re-Latinized c.1600.
When I first heard the word, I read it, of course, as “indikt”, and was told off for that. Little I knew that I was probably pronouncing it like the 16th c. language dictators would have liked me to.
Written language evolves so much more slowly than oral one. I think this is the reason why English is so inconsistent. In Greek, we have at list 6 ways of representing the phoneme “I”: We write it as (1) iota, (2) eta, (3) ypsilon, (4) epsilon+iota, (5) omikron+iota, (6) ypsilon+iota. In all cases, we pronounce it “I” as in “meek” (shorter, perhaps). Of course, in older Greek, all the above letters or diphthongs were pronounced differently.
Around Roman times, Greeks started pronouncing their language in a way that the learned ones considered inappropriate. (For example, they pronounced the word “eta lambda iota omikron sigma” as ilios rather than as helios–meaning sun.) They then introduced certain diacritical symbols (spirits) and stresses over vowels. Despite that, people pronounced the language the way they felt it was natural for them to. Up until 1980 or so, we had to learn how to write using all these symbols. We were not allowed to write without using them. They became particularly important during dictatorship times, e.g. between 1967-1974. If you dared not to use them you were punished. To me, it was irrational. But, ordinarily, nobody would even think not to write them: “of course, you have to”, they’d say. “Why?” No answer. Nobody knew why they were doing what they had been taught to do and never questioned. I was in school then and at some point chose not to use them because I demanded an explanation which nobody, the teachers notwithstanding, could give me. That was 73 or 74. I was punished and made fun of. Seven years later, well after democracy was re-established, the symbols were once and for all declared to be useless by a state law. Today, no child knows what they stand for and are only a curiosity.
Fascinating ! Thank you.
Indeed, an inordinate reverence for etymology and languages of status can serve as fantastic tools of manipulation in the right hands. Question: Who were the folks tidying up English spelling and how did they pull that off — it couldn’t happen today. Was it before there was much in print?
If interested: I wrote a short piece haughty use of original languages in religious/philosophical/literary circles.
Yes, using obscure or obsolete language as a means of establishing one’s power is a well-known phenomenon. We have a quote in Greek, about the chief dictator. He was an imbecile (sort of like George Bush, a bit more advanced, and not half as funny). His speech was utterly incomprehensible, a mixture of nonsense and pretentious language. Many a times simple people were impressed by his speeches, arguing thus: “It was so impressive I could understand nothing.”
Sabio Lantz: So you learned Greek to read the Bible? I daresay, having been shoved the Bible up the rear for years when I was at school, being forced to read it in the original (which is not too hard for a modern Greek), I would, when I was at school, look at a non-Greek attempting to read the text in Greek with dismay; and pity. I wish I had enough knowledge of Greek to read Euripides, say, with ease. But this is an order of magnitude harder than the Bible Greek.
(As for the word “list” in my previous posting, please forgive my slip-of-tongue: I meant to write “least”. I’m an idiot.)
So all the diacritical marks you see in Greek today are a relatively recent innovation? That’s interesting.
If you want an example of genuine and pretty successful spelling reform, look at Russian [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reforms_of_Russian_orthography]. Before the revolution Russian was almost as arbitrary and full of exceptions as English. For instance the hard sign (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%AA) came at the end of a large % of words (maybe 40%?) to signify that they ended in a non-soft consonant — pretty useless if you think about it.
Unfortunately this just shows that successful spelling reform requires nothing less than a brutal dictatorship putting a gun to the citizens’ heads to use the new spelling!
Sabio: as far as I know the ability for people to do some spelling reform in the 17th/18th(?) centuries for English resulted not really from a monopoly on printing but more on centralisation of dictionaries. I think that’s where the idea of “THE” dictionary comes from (as a source of official prescription). Plus the whole Latin and etymology studies stemmed from the Enlightenment and wishing to put English on a more rational basis.
Also just read the Original Source Mystique post — that definitely had a lot to do with it. The essentialism in this case was that Latin and Greek were imbibed with the essence of reason.
I actually have an example of Christian fundamentalist use of language essentialism to be in an upcoming post in the next few days so stay tuned!
Shouldn’t that be “out loud” or just “aloud” without the “out”?
Interesting post. Etymology is one of those subjects that I could definitely see myself having gotten into if I wasn’t already stuck on natural science.
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