It’s well known that Middle English /ɛr/ became more open in quality and merged with /ar/, while also in some dialects remaining as a distinct phoneme, but now pronounced /ɜː(r)/, leading to alternative forms for many words, of which one has remained as standard, the other becoming merely dialectal or regional: market, but merchant; person and parson; Derby as /ˈdɑːbi/ in British English but /ˈdɜːrbi/ in American English (and also sometimes regionally in England); likewise clerk as /klɑːk/ or /klɜːrk/ (/klɛrk/ still in Scots) – and spelt Clark as a family name; vermin (standard) but varmint ..read more

It is sometimes said that there are so-called ‘primitive’ languages which cannot count beyond two. I find this difficult to believe; but there are certainly languages which distinguish grammatically between one, two and many. They have not simply a singular and plural, but also a dual number. They are therefore not less sophisticated, but in this particular area, more precise, than those with ‘only’ two categories of number. The Indo-European languages’ ancestor was one of these, and there are some remnants of it in many of its descendants – including the Germanic languages, of which English i ..read more

So, the UN has accepted a request from Ankara to change the spelling of the name of the country of which it is the capital, to that used in the written version of the Turkish language. Well, if they also expect English speakers to change their pronunciation as well, good luck with that! I should be very surprised if English-language publications fall into line with the new spelling – although modern computerised type setting allows anyone to use an ‘ü’ easily, this doesn’t mean that everyone knows how to access that character, and newspapers in general tend not to add diacritics to letters of ..read more

The only pronunciation I’ve heard for this letter of the Greek alphabet since it was used for the name of the latest Coronavirus variant stresses the first letter, which is being pronounced to rhyme with both ohm and Tom indiscriminately. And yet the name ‘means’ “little O” as opposed to “big O” which is omega. If we split the names of both letters into their constituent parts, then the pronunciation is clearly ‘O micron’ and ‘O mega’, but when the two words are fused into one, the traditional English stress rule comes into play, and ‘O mega’, stressed (as two words) with a main stress on both ..read more

During the past week, I lstened to a fascinating radio programme which included a contribution by the world expert on meerkat behaviour, Tim Clutton-Brock. I was surprised that he pronounced the word for their mating behaviour as /pɒliˈgaɪnəs/. As always these days, not trusting my own memory and usage, I consulted all the pronouncing dictionaries I own, and not a single one gave this as a possible pronunciation. How could a world expert mispronounce a word which he must have heard from his colleagues many hundreds if not thousands of times? But then it occurred to me that he may be deliberate ..read more

Thomas West (@IntermarkLS) has tweeted: “In BrE I keep seeing things like “the last address you notified to the company” and “the complaint notified to the police.” This sounds so wrong in AmE (we notify someone of something; we don’t notify something to someone).” I refer him to the OED, which gives the following quotation from the Rolls of Parliament in 1433: “The whiche offre and agrement..[was] notified and communed to all the Lordes.” On this side of the Atlantic, we have recently acquired an American usage which sounds equally wrong to me, and was until this year very unusual in the UK ..read more

The latest edition of In Our Time on Radio 4 (first broadcast on 14 October 2021), the programme that tries to deal in depth with a narrow topic, was about the medieval elective kingdom of Lithuania and Poland (or the other way round). One of the speakers, as he introduced the topic, described the kingdom as covering an area of “one million kilometres squared”. Has the difference between “square kilometres” and “kilometres squared” changed since I was at school? (or similarly square miles and miles squared). To me the phrases “one kilometre square(d)” and “one square kilometre” indicate identi ..read more

I’ve been asked about the pronunciation of /s/ in initial strings of /str/. I know that it is common to pronounce it with a post-alveolar, apical articulation in Glasgow and London (David Abercrombie was talking about its occurrence in Glasgow at least forty years ago, and I have heard it from many Londoners myself). I’m now being asked how prevalent it is in English as a whole, and as none of my pronouncing dictionaries mention it (why should they?), and John Wells’ Accents of English doesn’t either (unless I’m just not seeing it), I’m hoping that someone can throw more light on it. It’s not ..read more

With the increasing number of BBC journalists who have South Asian heritage, we are hearing an ever greater number of examples of a non-traditional pronunciation of the orthographic symbol {t} in words of South Asian origin. I’m thinking in particular, but not solely, of the word Taleban. The initial T is pronounced with a dental articulation rather than alveolar by such renowned presenters/reporters/correspondents as Mishal Husain and Rita Chakrabarti, as well as those whose accents betray a South Asian upbringing. Interestingly, some Afghans who speak extremely good English are using the tra ..read more

Are BBC news scriptwriters using a system with predicitve spelling? In the last few days, I’ve been hearing nonsensical statements from reputable, and usually reliable Radio 4 newsreaders, and either they are uncharacteristically mis-reading their script, or the script is mis-spelt in a way that I can only attribute to predictive spelling. First, Alan Smith read out a business piece which included a claim that there were increasing vaccines in several industries (vacancies?), and today, Arlene Fleming has twice (at both one o’clock and six o’clock) talked about events in Suburbiton near Kingst ..read more