The Mother Tongue

by Bill Bryson

  Sometimes words change by becoming more specific. Starve originally meant to die before it took on the more particular sense of to die by hunger. A deer was once any animal (it still is in the German tier) and meat was any food (the sense is preserved in “meat and drink” and in the English food mincemeat, which contains various fruits but no meat in the sense that we now use it). A forest was any area of countryside set aside for hunting, whether or not it was covered with trees. (In England to this day, the Forest of Bowland in Lancashire is largely treeless, as are large stretches of the New Forest in Hampshire.) And worm was a term for any crawling creature, including snakes.

  5. WORDS ARE CREATED BY ADDING OR SUBTRACTING SOMETHING. English has more than a hundred common prefixes and suffixes— -able, -ness, -ment, pre-, dis-, anti-, and so on—and with these it can form and reform words with a facility that yet again sets it apart from other tongues. For example, we can take the French word mutin (rebellion) and turn it into mutiny, mutinous, mutinously, mutineer, and many others, while the French have still just the one form, mutin.

  We are astonishingly indiscriminate in how we form our compounds, sometimes adding an Anglo-Saxon prefix or suffix to a Greek or Latin root (plainness, sympathizer), and sometimes vice versa (readable, disbelieve). [Examples cited by Burchfield, The English Language, page 112.] This inclination to use affixes and infixes provides gratifying flexibility in creating or modifying words to fit new uses, as strikingly demonstrated in the word incomprehensibility, which consists of the root -hen- and eight affixes and infixes: in, -com-, -pre-, -s-, -ib-, -il-, -it-, and -y. Even more melodic is the musical term quasihemidemisemiquaver, which describes a note that is equal to 128th of a semibreve.

  As well as showing flexibility it also promotes confusion. We have six ways of making labyrinth into an adjective: labyrinthian, labyrinthean, labyrinthal, labyrinthine, labyrinthic, and labyrinthical. We have at least eight ways of expressing negation with prefixes: a-, anti-, in-, il-, im-, ir-, un-, and non-. It is arguable whether this is a sign of admirable variety or just untidiness. It must be exasperating for foreigners to have to learn that a thing unseen is not unvisible, but invisible, while something that cannot be reversed is not inreversible but irreversible and that a thing not possible is not nonpossible or antipossible but impossible. Furthermore, they must learn not to make the elementary mistake of assuming that because a word contains a negative suffix or prefix it is necessarily a negative word. In-, for instance, almost always implies negation but not with invaluable, while -less is equally negative, as a rule, but not with priceless. Things are so confusing that even native users have shown signs of mental fatigue and left us with two forms meaning the same thing: flammable and inflammable, iterate and reiterate, ebriate and inebriate, habitable and inhabitable, durable and perdurable, fervid and perfervid, gather and forgather, ravel and unravel.

  Some of our word endings are surprisingly rare. If you think of angry and hungry, you might conclude that -gry is a common ending, but in fact it occurs in no other common words in English. Similarly -dous appears in only stupendous, horrendous, tremendous, hazardous, and jeopardous, while -lock survives only in wedlock and warlock and -red only in hatred and kindred. Forgiveness is the only example of a verb + -ness form. Equally some common-seeming prefixes are actually more rare than superficial thought might lead us to conclude. If you think of forgive, forget, forgo, forbid, forbear, forlorn, forsake, and forswear, you might think that for- is a common prefix, but in fact it appears in no other common words, though once it appeared in scores of others. Why certain forms like -ish, -ness, -ful, and -some should continue to thrive while others like -lock and -gry that were once equally popular should fall into disuse is a question without a good answer.

  Fashion clearly has something to do with it. The suffix -dom was long in danger of disappearing, except in a few established words like kingdom, but it underwent a resurgence (largely instigated in America) in the last century, giving us such useful locutions as officialdom and boredom and later more contrived forms like bestsellerdom. The ending -en is today one of the most versatile ways we have of forming verbs from adjectives (harden, loosen, sweeten, etc.) and yet almost all such words are less than 300 years old.

  Nor is there any discernible pattern to help explain why a particular affix attaches itself to a particular word or why some creations have thrived while others have died of neglect. Why, for instance, should we have kept disagree but lost disadorn, retained impede but banished expede, kept inhibit but rejected cohibit [cited by Baugh and Cable, page 225]?

  The process is still perhaps the most prolific way of forming new words and often the simplest. For centuries we had the word political, but by loading the single letter a onto the front of it, a new word, apolitical, joined the language in 1952.

  Still other words are formed by lopping off their ends. Mob, for example, is a shortened form of mobile vulgus (fickle crowd). Exam, gym, and lab are similar truncations, all of them dating only from the last century when syllabic amputations were the rage. Yet the impulse to shorten words is an ancient one.

  Finally, but no less importantly, English possesses the ability to make new words by fusing compounds—airport, seashore, footwear, wristwatch, landmark, flowerpot, and so on almost endlessly. All Indo-European languages have the capacity to form compounds. Indeed, German and Dutch do it, one might say, to excess. But English does it more neatly than most other languages, eschewing the choking word chains that bedevil other Germanic languages and employing the nifty refinement of making the elements reversible, so that we can distinguish between a houseboat and a boathouse, between basketwork and a workbasket, between a casebook and a bookcase. Other languages lack this facility.

  6.

  Pronunciation

  What is the most common vowel sound in English? Would you say it is the o of hot, the a of cat, the e of red, the i of in, the u of up? In fact, it is none of these. It isn’t even a standard vowel sound. It is the colorless murmur of the schwa, represented by the symbol [ə] and appearing as one or more of the vowel sounds in words without number. It is the sound of i in animal, of e in enough, of the middle o in orthodox, of the second, fourth, fifth, and sixth vowels in inspirational, and of at least one of the vowels in almost every multisyllabic word in the language. It is everywhere.

  This reliance of ours on one drab phoneme is a little odd when you consider that English contains as lush a mixture of phonics as any language in the world. We may think we’re pretty tame when we encounter such tongue twisters as the Czech vrch pln mlh (meaning “a hill in the fog”) or Gaelic agglomerations like pwy ydych chi (Welsh for “how are you?”), but on the other hand, we possess a number of sounds that other languages find treacherous and daunting, most notably the “th” sound of the and think, which is remarkably rare in the world at large, or the “l” sound that Orientals find so deeply impossible. (I once worked with a Chinese fellow in England who when things went wrong would mutter darkly, “Bruddy hairo!” which I took to be some ancient Cantonese invective; it was not until many months later that I realized he was just saying, “Bloody hell.”)

  If there is one thing certain about English pronunciation it is that there is almost nothing certain about it. No other language in the world has more words spelled the same way and yet pronounced differently. Consider just a few:

  heard

  —

  beard

  road

  —

  broad

  five

  —

  give

  fillet

  —

  skillet

  early

  —

  dearly

  beau

  —

  beauty

  steak

  —

  streak

  ache

  —

  mustache

  low

  —

  how

  doll

  —

&nbs
p; droll

  scour

  —

  four

  four

  —

  tour

  grieve

  —

  sieve

  paid

  —

  said

  break

  —

  speak

  In some languages, such as Finnish, there is a neat one-to-one correspondence between sound and spelling. A k to the Finns is always “k,” an l eternally and comfortingly “l.” But in English, pronunciation is so various—one might almost say random—that not one of our twenty-six letters can be relied on for constancy. Either they clasp to themselves a variety of pronunciations, as with the c in race, rack, and rich, or they sulk in silence, like the b in debt, the a in bread, the second t in thistle. In combinations they become even more unruly and unpredictable, most famously in the letter cluster ough, which can be pronounced in any of eight ways—as in through, though, thought, tough, plough, thorough, hiccough, and lough (an Irish-English word for lake or loch, pronounced roughly as the latter). The pronunciation possibilities are so various that probably not one English speaker in a hundred could pronounce with confidence the name of a crowlike bird called the chough. (It’s chuff.) Two words in English, hegemony and phthisis, have nine pronunciations each. But perhaps nothing speaks more clearly for the absurdities of English pronunciation than that the word for the study of pronunciation in English, orthoepy, can itself be pronounced two ways.

  Every language has its quirks and all languages, for whatever reason, happily accept conventions and limitations that aren’t necessarily called for. In English, for example, we don’t have words like fwost or zpink or abtholve because we never normally combine those letters to make those sounds, though there’s no reason why we couldn’t if we wanted to. We just don’t. Chinese takes this matter of self-denial to extremes, particularly in the variety of the language spoken in the capital, Peking. All Chinese dialects are monosyllabic—which can itself be almost absurdly limiting—but the Pekingese dialect goes a step further and demands that all words end in an “n” or “ng” sound. As a result, there are so few phonetic possibilities in Pekingese that each sound must represent on average seventy words. Just one sound, “yi,” can stand for 215 separate words. Partly the Chinese get around this by using rising or falling pitches to vary the sounds fractionally, but even so in some dialects a falling “i” can still represent almost forty unrelated words. We use pitch in English to a small extent, as when we differentiate between “oh” and “oh?” and “oh!” but essentially we function by relying on a pleasingly diverse range of sounds.

  Almost everyone agrees that English possesses more sounds than almost any other language, though few agree on just how many sounds that might be. The British authority Simeon Potter says there are forty-four distinct sounds—twelve vowels, nine diphthongs (a kind of gliding vowel), and twenty-three consonants. The International Phonetic Alphabet, perhaps the most widely used, differentiates between fifty-two sounds used in English, divided equally between consonants and vowels, while the American Heritage Dictionary lists forty-five for purely English sounds, plus a further half dozen for foreign terms. Italian, by contrast, uses only about half as many sounds, a mere twenty-seven, while Hawaiian gets by with just thirteen. So whether the number in English is forty-four or fifty-two or something in between, it is quite a lot. But having said that, if you listen carefully, you will find that there are many more than this.

  The combination “ng,” for example, is usually treated as one discrete sound, as in bring and sing. But in fact we make two sounds with it—employing a soft “g” with singer and a hard “g” with finger. We also tend to vary its duration, giving it fractionally more resonance in descriptive or onomatopoeic words like zing and bong and rather less in mundane words like something and rang. We make another unconscious distinction between the hard “th” of those and the soft one of thought. Some dictionaries fail to note this distinction and yet it makes all the difference between mouth as a noun and mouth as a verb, and between the noun thigh and the adjective thy. More subtly still, when we use a “k” sound at the start of a word, we put a tiny puff of breath behind it (as in kitchen and conquer) but when the “k” follows an s (as in skill or skid) we withhold the puff. When we make an everyday observation like “I have some homework to do,” we pronounce the word “hav.” But when we become emphatic about it—“I have to go now”—we pronounce it “haff.”

  Each time we speak we make a multitude of such fractional adjustments, most of which we are wholly unaware of. But these only begin to hint at the complexity of our phonetics. An analysis of speech at the Bell Telephone Laboratories by Dr. John R. Pierce detected more than ninety separate sounds just for the letter t.

  We pronounce many words—perhaps most—in ways that are considerably at variance with the ways they are spelled and often even more so with the ways we think we are saying them. We may believe we say “later” but in fact we say “lader.” We may think we say “ladies,” but it’s more probably “laties” or even, in the middle of a busy sentence, “lays.” Handbag comes out as “hambag.” We think we say “butter,” but it’s really “budder” or “buddah” or even “bu’r.” We see wash, but say “worsh.” We think we say “granted,” but really say “grannid.” No one says “looked.” It’s “lookt.” “I’ll just get her” becomes “aldges gedder.” We constantly allow sounds to creep into words where they have no real business. We introduce a “p” between “m” and “t” or “m” and “s” sounds, so that we really say “warmpth” and “somepthing.” We can’t help ourselves. We similarly put a “t” between “n” and “s” sounds, which is why it is nearly impossible for us to distinguish between mints and mince or between prints and prince. Occasionally these intruders become established in the spellings. Glimpse (coming from the same source as gleam) was originally glimsen, with no “p,” but the curious desire to put one there proved irresistible over time. Thunder originally had no “d” (German donner still doesn’t) and stand had no “n.” One was added to stand, but not, oddly, to stood. Messenger never had an “n” (message still doesn’t), pageant never had a “t,” and sound no “d.”

  We tend to slur those things most familiar to us, particularly place-names. Australians will tell you they come from “Stralia,” while Torontoans will tell you they come from “Tronna.” In Iowa it’s “Iwa” and in Ohio it’s “Hia.” People from Milwaukee say they’re from “Mwawkee.” In Louisville it’s “Loovul,” in Newark it’s “Nerk,” and in Indianapolis it’s “Naplus.” People in Philadelphia don’t come from there; they come from “Fuhluffia.” The amount of slurring depends on the degree of familiarity and frequency with which the word is spoken. The process is well illustrated by the street in London called Marylebone Road. Visitors from abroad often misread it as “Marleybone.” Provincial Britons tend to give it its full phonetic value: “Mary-luh-bone.” Londoners are inclined to slur it to “Mairbun” or something similar while those who live or work along it slur it even further to something not far off “Mbn.”

  For the record, when bits are nicked off the front end of words it’s called aphesis, when off the back it’s called apocope, and when from the middle it’s syncope. A somewhat extreme example of the process is the naval shortening of forecastle to fo’c’sle, but the tendency to compress is as old as language itself. Daisy was once day’s eye, good-bye was God-be-with-you, hello was (possibly) whole-be-thou, shepherd was sheep herd, lord was loafward, every was everich, fortnight (a word curiously neglected in America) was fourteen-night.

  The British, who are noted for their clipped diction, are particularly good at lopping syllables off words as if with a sword, turning immediately into “meejutly,” necessary into “nessree,” library into “libree.” The process was brought to a kind of glorious consummation with a word that is now all but dead—halfpennyworth. With the disappearance in the 1980s of the halfpenny (itself neat
ly hacked down in spoken British to hapenee), the English are now denied the rich satisfaction of compressing halfpennyworth into haypth. They must instead content themselves with giving their place-names a squeeze—turning Barnoldswick into “Barlick,” Wymondham into “Windum,” Cholmondeston into “Chumson.” (Of which much more in Chapter 13.)

  We Americans like to think our diction more precise. To be sure, we do give full value to each syllable in words like necessary, immediate, dignatory, lavatory, and (very nearly) laboratory. On the other hand, we more freely admit a dead schwa into -ile words such as fragile, hostile, and mobile (though not, perversely, into infantile and mercantile) where the British are, by contrast, scrupulously phonetic. And both of us, I would submit, are equally prone to slur phrases—though not necessarily the same ones. Where the British will say howjado for “how do you do,” an American will say jeetjet for “have you taken sustenance recently?” and lesskweet for “in that case, let us retire to a convivial place for a spot of refreshment.”

  This tendency to compress and mangle words was first formally noted in a 1949 New Yorker article by one John Davenport who gave it the happy name of Slurvian. In American English, Slurvian perhaps reaches its pinnacle in Baltimore, a city whose citizens have long had a particular gift for chewing up the most important vowels, consonants, and even syllables of most words and converting them into a kind of verbal compost, to put it in the most charitable terms possible. In Baltimore (pronounced Balamer), an eagle is an “iggle,” a tiger is a “tagger,” water is “wooder,” a power mower is a “paramour,” a store is a “stewer,” clothes are “clays,” orange juice is “arnjoos,” a bureau is a “beero,” and the Orals are of course the local baseball team. Whole glossaries have been composed to help outsiders interpret these and the many hundreds of other terms that in Baltimore pass for English. Baltimoreans may be masters at this particular art, but it is one practiced to a greater or lesser degree by people everywhere.