The Australian author Gerald Murnane (“regarded by many as Australia’s most innovative and important writer of fiction”) has a long essay called “The Angel’s Son: Why I Learned Hungarian Late in Life” which is perhaps a tad self-indulgent, but I guess if you’re that innovative and important you have a right to indulge yourself, and there’s plenty of material of Hattic interest:
Many persons are fluent in more than one language, but my setting out some years ago at the age of fifty-six to teach myself Hungarian provokes comments and questions from those who get to hear of it.
Like much else seen in hindsight, my enterprise seems to me now to have been inevitable. In my early years I envied various persons for various reasons, but my strongest envy was always directed at those who could read and write and speak and sing in more than one language.
The first such persons that I was aware of were the Catholic priests who celebrated the mass and other services in the churches that I attended in the 1940s. […] I was only seven when I resolved to learn the sonorous Latin language. I found in my father’s missal pages with parallel Latin and English texts. I imagined I could learn the language simply by finding which word in the Latin text was the equivalent of one or another word in the English text and so accumulating a Latin vocabulary to be drawn on as required. I was brought up short when I found that the Latin for God might be Deum, Deus, Dei, or Deo. This and other problems made Latin seem to me perverse and arbitrary by comparison with my native English but only increased my desire eventually to master Latin. In the meanwhile, I derived unexpected pleasures from hearing or, more often, mishearing the language.
I think of myself nowadays as a person who reads words rather than hears them. At school or at university, whenever I wanted to memorise a passage I studied it in such a way that I was able afterwards to visualise its appearance on the page. I often notice myself reading in the air, as it were, my own and other persons’ words during a conversation. For some years during my childhood, I felt obliged to write with my finger on the nearest surface every word that came to my mind. Walking to school, for example, I scribbled continually with the point of my index finger on the smooth leather of my schoolbag, trying to record in writing the onrush of my thoughts. For how long, I wonder, has English been for me only a written language? […]
I omit a great deal of material on horse-racing, of which he says: “I have got from horse-racing during my lifetime more meaning than I have got from literature or music or any other branch of what is generally called culture.” I, per contra, have zero interest in it, so I will pass on to this:
During the twenty years when I was writing most of my published fiction, English was my only language. Nor did I ever feel that my native language was less than adequate for my purposes. Nor will I ever so feel. And yet, for much of my life I have felt that I lacked something by not being fluent in a second language. In 1951, when the first so-called New Australians arrived at my primary school, I persuaded a Maltese boy to teach me to speak his native language. Before he grew tired of it, he had taught me a good deal. I studied Latin and French successfully throughout secondary school. When I began at university in my late twenties, I was obliged to enrol in at least one unit of a foreign language. I chose Arabic and eventually completed a major in it. I was sorry to find that the examinations were only in writing. I never learned to converse in Arabic, although I was able to read and write it rather well. I recall little of the language today, however. Finally, when I was preparing to leave full-time employment in my mid-fifties, I bought two dictionaries and a teach-yourself book with an accompanying cassette and prepared to learn the Hungarian language.
I had seen photographs of Hungarian peasants in a National Geographic magazine when I was barely able to read. The photographs were illustrations for an article about Romania, and many years were to pass before I understood the details of the tragic separation of the millions of Hungarians in Transylvania from their compatriots after the First World War. I stared at pictures of peoples from many parts of the world in the second-hand: National Geographic magazines that my father brought home from somewhere in the 1940s, but for reasons that I have never been able to explain, I was drawn to the Hungarians.
I cannot claim that I was a steadfast admirer during my childhood of Hungarian culture, but I remember instances when I thought of Hungary as having a claim on me. When I first saw pictures of the Great Plain of Hungary, when I first learned that the Hungarians had come from somewhere in Asia; when I learned of the affinity of Hungarians and the horse; and, above all, when I learned that the Hungarian language is more or less alone in the world, bearing little resemblance to any other language – at such times I heard in my mind something like the far-away or Sunday-afternoon sounds of my childhood; I heard myself speaking solemnly in Hungarian or even singing Hungarian songs, even though I knew not one word of the Magyar language. […]
In 1977, I read for the first time a book titled People of the Puszta. It was an English translation of Puszták népe, by Gyula Illyés, which was first published in Hungary in 1936. The book had such an effect on me that I later wrote a book of my own in order to relieve my feelings. Any reader interested in this matter is referred to Inland, 1988.
I have read several times during my life that this or that person was so impressed by this or that translation of this or that work of literature that the person afterwards learned the original language in order to read the original text. I have always been suspicious of this sort of claim, but, the reader of this piece of writing need not doubt the truth of the following sentence. I was so impressed by the English version of Puszták népe that I afterwards learned the language of the original and, as of now, have read a goodly part of it.
Even though I learned Hungarian for the first three years on my own, I was trying to learn it as a spoken language and not just a language of texts. I listened to my cassette and I learned by heart and recited often aloud all the passages of Hungarian dialogue in my textbook. I even listened to Hungarian radio programmes, although the speakers were too fast for my comprehension. For three years I kept the Hungarian language confined within the four walls of my study, but then the language could bear its solitude no longer and broke free of me. On a memorable day in May, 1998, I found myself approaching the only Hungarian person I knew. He was a retired truck-driver from my own suburb. I had never so much as nodded to him previously, but on the memorable day I addressed him in my halting Hungarian. He embraced me as though I was a long-lost compatriot.
Joseph Kulcsar had had a humble occupation, but he was an outstanding figure in the Australian Hungarian community. Here, I mention only his extensive knowledge of Hungarian literature and history and his talents as an actor and a reciter of verse, although he was famous and respected for much else. But the day when I approached Joe in the street was a fateful day in more ways than one. Earlier that day, Joe had been diagnosed as having cancer. He lived for two years more. […]
I have learned a number of Hungarian poems by heart, plus as many folk songs. And I have translated for publication two Hungarian poems the themes of which relate to this essay. But I try to explain to my friends what I am trying to explain to readers of this writing: that I learned Hungarian for purely personal reasons. My years-long enterprise might even be called an act of self-indulgence.
I learned to hear English and to speak English before I learned to read and to write English, but I long ago lost my awareness of English as a system of sounds. I learned to hear and to speak and to read and to write Hungarian all during the same time, but I am able with only a little effort, while I speak or recite or sing or merely listen, to become aware of Hungarian as mostly sounds. I can never be unaware of the written language. Somewhere in my mind the words go on appearing as writing. But the consistent sounds of Hungarian vowels and consonants and the strangely uniform pattern of stresses (only the first syllable of any word is stressed) take my attention away from the writing. […]
In the fourth year of my learning Hungarian and the first year of my friendship with Joe Kulcsar, I happened to hear from a community radio station a recitation of a long poem. Its title in English is “Ode to the Hungarian Language”. The poet is György Faludy. The recitation lasted for perhaps eight minutes. It was sufficiently slow and clear for me to understand the outline of the poem, although much of the vocabulary was strange to me. What I most noticed was the sound of the poem. Some passages seemed to have been written especially to allow the sounds of Hungarian to come into play. Twenty years earlier, while I read an English translation of the prose of Gyula Illyés, I had vowed one day to read the original in Hungarian. Now, listening to György Faludy’s “Ode”, I vowed to find the text and to learn it by heart.
On my next visit to Joe Kulcsar, I described what I had heard from the radio.
I spoke as though Joe himself might not have heard of the poem. When I had finished speaking, Joe drew himself up in his chair and recited by-heart the whole of ‘Ode to the Hungarian Language’. Afterwards, he handed me a copy of the text so that I could learn it for myself, and before I left him that day he took me through the poem, explaining difficult passages and historical allusions. […]
I soon learned the poem by heart, although I could not say even today, several years later, that I have discovered all its meaning. During much of the poem, the poet considers by turns some of the lexical and grammatical components of his native language. Each of these he apprehends through his senses, so to speak. The ending of the past tense is the black crow’s-wing of Hungarian history, for example, and the dark shadow of the gallows, the stake, and the cross. Adjectives are an endless flowering furrow. Obsolete words are deserted villages. But these few examples of mine can barely hint at the richness of the poem, which leads my thoughts through a quite different sequence of visual imagery whenever I recite it. […]
During one of my visits to Joe Kulcsar in the last year of his life, I tried to explain to him in Hungarian something of what I have tried to explain in this essay. He heard me out politely enough, but I wondered afterwards how much I had managed to explain. Then, a few months later, I read a report of an interview with Joe in the Hungarian-language weekly, Magyar Élet. The interviewer, Livia Bagin, at one point asked Joe about the Australian writer who was learning Hungarian from him. Joe spoke briefly about me and then, in one neat Hungarian sentence, reported what must have seemed to him the best summary of all he had heard from me about my reasons for making an old, Asian tongue my second language.
#Azt mondja, hogy az angyalok a mennyországban magyarul beszélnek.
He says that the angels in heaven speak Hungarian.
There is a translation by John Ridland and Peter Czipott of “Ode to the Hungarian Language” here, and the original, “Óda a magyar nyelvhez,” is here; my Hungarian is very rusty, and was never that good to begin with, but it certainly strikes me as an impressive poem. (I have a bilingual collection of Faludy, but alas, it doesn’t include the Ode.)
Welcome to SAE – I’m struck by the syntax: it’s as similar to German as possible.
Also, is heaven a country?
This paragraph
I learned to hear English and to speak English before I learned to read and to write English, but I long ago lost my awareness of English as a system of sounds. I learned to hear and to speak and to read and to write Hungarian all during the same time, but I am able with only a little effort, while I speak or recite or sing or merely listen, to become aware of Hungarian as mostly sounds. I can never be unaware of the written language. Somewhere in my mind the words go on appearing as writing.
sums up for me something that is often forgotten. There is the language that is learnt at one’s mother’s knee (as it is quaintly expressed), and the language (including reading and writing) that one learns at school. This seems to me to be something often forgotten in discussing language.
A simple example is the explanation of non-rhotic English. If you learn English from its spelling, the non-rhotic habit of not pronouncing /r/ where it is supposed to occur, and inserting /r/ where it’s not supposed to occur, at first glance looks strange and erratic. But if you realise that the ‘r’ you see in spelling doesn’t correspond to /r/ in non-rhotic spoken English, the phenomenon becomes much clearer. For a non-rhotic child, ‘mother’ (for instance) doesn’t contain an /r/ — it’s mᴧðə. The ‘r’ in ‘mother’ has to be specially learnt after you’ve learnt to speak the language. If you know that, everything falls into place much more easily.
For some reason the phonetic symbols mᴧðə seem to have turned into má´§Ã°É when I published the comment. I’m not sure why. And it keeps changing when I edit the comment!
“I think of myself nowadays as a person who reads words rather than hears them.”
This reminds me of the disdain felt by some people towards readers who have to mumble the words under their breath in order to be able to read them. But I don’t get the feeling that’s what he’s referring to; only if not, then I don’t understand what he’s getting at instead.
In the 1980s my illustrious and dear friend Carmel Bird wrote a piece called “Gerald Murnane’s Tasmania”, as mentioned many years later here. A large part of the motivation was that Murnane had never even set foot on our Island State, though it’s an easy flight south of Melbourne. This factlet always reminded me of a giant of twentieth-century philosophy David Lewis, who to his dying day never tasted our iconic Vegemite so that he would always have to hand an example of an unexperienced quale, one familiar to his Austral audiences.
Like Hat and unlike Murnane, I have no interest in horse racing. But I too aspire to some competence in Hungarian, my wife’s first language. So hard! The sagest advice might be: “If I wanted to get there, I wouldn’t start from English.” Still, I can get by on selected household topics; and the magyarity of the time I can find a way to insert it into multilingual wordplay (a bad habit, but it keeps the left temporal lobe honed). I can even dare to translate Hungarian verse, when challenged to do so.
With all the digressions into horses, and for want of a better way of putting it, a certain turn of phrase, I smelled a whiff of Flann O’Brien.
the magyarity of the time
I enjoyed that!
“I have long since come to accept that when I do what is usually denoted by the verb to imagine, I am able to call to mind only details and never wholes.”
This sounds to me like a recently-identified mental condition called “aphantasia”. It’s the inability to see pictures while visualizing something mentally. I know, diagnosis based on severely incomplete data is a bad idea, but that sentence rings a bell for me.
I know what he means about being unable to hear words without mentally reading them; that’s a high bar, well above where I am now. I can pick out the Hungarian words are if they’re spoken/sung slowly enough and use vocabulary I know, but I can’t help visualizing where the accents go. Almost all foreign language teaching uses writing as a crutch, because it’s persistent: if it takes you a couple of seconds to remember what a word means, the writing is still there waiting patiently for you to catch up. And written forms are much less variable than spoken ones.
as similar to German as possible
You want similar to German, check out the separable verb prefixes!
I’m with Murnane: no more difficult than any other language. No more difficult than German, at least as far as I’ve seen so far. It has a word for “the”, it has accusative and dative cases — all familiar.
Yes, I didn’t find it that difficult; I just got distracted and lost track of it before I got any good at it.
After all that build-up of decades and photos torn from fortuitously acquired magazines and the romance of a landscape devoid of features, yielding attachment dependent neither on blood nor friendship nor any direct experience, but instead on a whole life of quantum entanglement…
I got to the point where he couldn’t be bothered to finish Puszták népe and decided this person was fatuous.
Do most non-rhotics have liaison — motha but motha-rin-law? Any who do wouldn’t be surprised to find the R in the spelling, wouldn’t learn about it after they learn to speak the language.
Most varieties do, yes. AAVE is an exception.
Yes, pretty much all non-rhotics have the liaison, as far as I can tell. And the intrusive and linking Rs.
Watching a non-rhotic young child write words with Rs is interesting and reinforces Bathrobe’s comment above – spellings like ‘mutha’ and ‘fatha’.
@John Cowan Yes, I didn’t consider AAVE. Come to think of it, I have no idea about non-white native English speakers in Africa either. I was referring to white folk.
Intrusive r is so pervasive in most of non rhotic Britain that liaison is no help in spelling; e.g. the difference between “peninsula” and “peninsular” is never reflected phonetically, and those unaware of morphological considerations will often guess the wrong spelling.
Synchronicity: Why Borges learnt Old English
Any who do wouldn’t be surprised to find the R in the spelling
You are thinking like a rhotic speaker. The thing is, the ‘r’ can be inserted into any suitable environment, whether there is an ‘r’ in the spelling or not. That’s why non-rhotics say “the idear of it”. The ‘r’ isn’t part of the word; it’s purely a linking element. It’s also why some non-rhotics trying to sing in an American accent insert an ‘r’ where an American wouldn’t. They have no idea that an ‘r’ has to be in the spelling to be pronounced. They simply think (for instance) that “idea” and “mother” are words that Americans will tack an ‘r’ onto.
I won’t be able to find the thread, but someone here in the last few weeks said that as a non-rhotic they did pronounce r-finial syllables differently than schwa-finial. Is that not supported by those who are more analytical?
My severe, but not total, aphantasia.
Here’s a good article by a well-informed journalist who is aphantasic:
This is all spot-on for me, except for the references to loud noises and bright lights, which do bother me. On the other hand, when someone farts or poops I think “Oh, a bad smell” and carry on while everyone around me is gasping and gagging. (Rotten food is another story.)
Another thing I found out to my surprise is that in total darkness Gale’s visual field was filled with complex imagery, whereas I see solid black. Indeed, in the dark I can navigate better with my eyes shut, since darkness isn’t normally total and shutting my eyes eliminates any distracting visual input.
as a non-rhotic they did pronounce r-finial syllables differently than schwa-finial
I don’t remember that. I do know that /r/ is (or can be) replaced by schwa in certain types of final. For instance:
air (ends in schwa)
here (ends in schwa)
door (ends in schwa)
tour (ends in schwa)
In Australian English, however, this alternates with a schwaless version (except in ‘tour’ — although a schwaless version is found in RP). And even words like ‘law’ can be pronounced, at least by some people, with a final schwa. The disappearance of “post-vocalic /r/” did have messy consequences.
My point was that, at least in my own version of non-rhotic English, the naive native speaker (and a pre-literate child is the epitome of the naive native speaker) does not even suspect an ‘r’ in those positions. Of course, there are obviously more sophisticated speakers around. For instance, a small minority of students study “speech and drama”, which teaches elocution, who are taught that ‘r’s should not be inserted where they are not found (so ‘drawing’ must be pronounced without an ‘r’, unlike the fairly common ‘droring’ pronunciation). I think there are also people who are aware that rhotic speakers don’t insert ‘r’s indiscriminately. But there are many speakers who don’t reach that level of sophistication, despite learning to spell words with an ‘r’ in them that they don’t pronounce. Since English spelling is pretty chaotic, it wouldn’t strike most people as strange that there are words spelt with an unnecessary ‘r’.
@ JC : Ever since childhood I have spent a lot of time looking at the inside of my eyelids. On the edge of sleep the rods and cones seem sometimes to crystallize (if that’s the right word) into familiar very banal forms, textures really: rockpiles or lumber rooms rooms full of blurry furniture, apparently detailed but which you can’t quite bring to focus because you fall asleep. Eventually they fade to black and after a while (I have begun to realize that) you can start to see your blind spot(s).
I remember bringing up, a few months ago, that JBR the Arrhotic had taught me that seven and Severn are exact homophones in arrhotic BrE, DE the Rhotic doubted that, and then 2 or 3 arrhotics confirmed it.
In arrhotic German these things are neatly kept apart, though the distinction between unstressed er and unstressed a is quite wobbly and has been completely lost in some accents. Linking r is not as widespread as in English; intrusive r is lexicalized.
BTTT
In among all of GM’s long narrative one thing struck me in particular – the surname of his Hungarian acquaintance.
Kulcsar is derived from ‘kulcs’ = ‘key’
Kulcs itself is derived from the Slavic (eg. in Croatian) ključ.
Hungarian surnames and words are of particular interest because they tend to preserve earlier stages of Slavic in loanwords.
However, in kulcs, the kl- became kul- instead. 🙁
seven and Severn are exact homophones for me.
Of course, they might differ for people who adopt spelling pronunciations.
Kulcs itself is derived from the Slavic (eg. in Croatian) ključ.
Metathesis, yes. Compare as a similar example the words for plum in Hungarian (szilva), Russian (слива), Polish (śliwka), and Serbian (шљива, šljiva). Remembering, of course, that Hungarian s is /ʃ/ but sz is /s/: something like the reverse of Polish,* but with complications concerning Polish ś and sz. And expanding to Balto-Slavic, slyva in Lithuanian.
* Reverse Polish notation, Stu.
ref seven and Severn are exact homophones for me.
@Bathrobe Of course, they might differ for people who adopt spelling pronunciations.
I think Proper Names are not that simple [**]. Severn derives from a Celtic/pre-Roman name, various forms but all with r directly following a consonant, preceding a vowel.
So I’m careful to sound the r, even when I’m not paying attention to pronunciation/am probably mainly non-rhotic. (I therefore pronounce Bath the city different to tin bath in the scullery — at least when I return to Yorkshire I do.)
Do you have a better example?
[**] Brit E has a long tradition of pronouncing placenames/personal names not at all like you’d guess from the spelling — even crazy English spelling. Featherstonehaugh, Happisburgh, Beauchamp. Unfortunately, this wiki compiler seems suspiciously consistently rhotic: Isleworth — where I grew up — is definitely not rhotic. Their sample is from some toff helicoptered in from some Public School, Harrow probably — which is rhotic, but starts with a glottal and ends with a schwa, as pronounced in Isleworth.
Kulcsar is derived from ‘kulcs’ = ‘key’
Kulcs itself is derived from the Slavic (eg. in Croatian) ključ.
But ključar is a word in Slavic too (not in Russian)!
Also, is heaven a country?
I’d guess that mennyország is the equivalent to German Himmelreich “heavenly realm”. I can imagine a pious German of Kulcsar’s generation saying something like die Engel im Himmelreich.
@Bathrobe
Do you mean these are monosyllables where the vowel is a centring dipthong, or that they are disyllables where the second syllable is a schwa? Are pair/payer, wheatear/wheatier, roar/rower, dour/doer homophones?
Not a native speaker, but as that seems to be the pronunciation I learnt, it’s the former – a diphthong with a schwa-like second element. The two sets you name are not homophones.
I never knew dour was ever pronounced other than with an /aʊ/, or anyway rhyming with sour, hour.
For me, the ranges of sour and hour are not the same, but they overlap (with dour in between?). But then, L2.
Longman’s considers the two to be homophones, in both RP and Gen Am.
A spot check of four poems with dour, read by their American authors, at the Poetry Foundation, finds two monopthongists (W.D. Snodgrass, b. 1926, PA; James Schuyler, b. 1923, Chicago) and two diphthongists (Jeffrey Jullich, b. 1950s; Alice Notley, b. 1945, AZ).
Huh, dour not rhyming with hour was news to me too; I guess it’s not a word I’ve heard spoken very much. AHD usage note:
OED (revised 2018):
Fowler in 1926 was resisting the newer pronunciation, in a curt entry: “dour. Pronounce door, not dowr.” (That’s his pronunciation respelling, i.e., he means “rhymes with boor”, not “like the word door”.)
(monophthongists. Lazy finger.)
I used to rhyme it with tour myself, but gave up and joined the crowd rather than have to constantly explain myself.
I guess roar/rower would better have been roar/rawer, or better still nor/gnawer (or possibly drawer/drawer “slidable box”/”one who draws”)
NORTH = THOUGHT + /r/ is a more likely rhyme than FORCE = GOAT + /r/
I was quite surprised to learn that prayer is an American monosyllable (with DRESS).
Ah, yes, that makes sense.
Y:
Longman’s considers the two (dour and doer) to be homophones, in both RP and Gen Am.
Which Longman’s? Their general dictionary online has this for dour ($ precedes US pronunciations):
But both UK and US spoken voice renderings give a /daʊ–/ variant. There’s nothing for dourly.
Longman Pronunciation Dictionary (LPD, 3rd edition, current; book and CD-ROM), has this ($ precedes US pronunciations; bold is a preferred variant):
UK and US voice renderings are exactly those used in the general dictionary, with /daʊ–/.
However, in both the general and the LPD dictionary for doer we get:
So for Longman, dour and doer are on no account exact homophones. Oddly, for LPD:
And here the LPD UK voice gives the variant /dʊə–/, but the US voice gives first /daʊ–/ and then /dʊə–/ (the first such double I have encountered in LPD spoken pronunciations).
That’s all pretty mixed up. Anyway, I still say /dʊə/.
DM:
I was quite surprised to learn that prayer is an American monosyllable
It is in all varieties English that I know of (except when it means “one who prays”). The similar one that strikes Australians as odd is the two-syllable US mayor. LPD:
Also, is heaven a country?
It’s a Country for Old Men:
As confirmed by all evidence adduced above:
“It was a one-horse town, and my mother was the mayor.”
I should have been more precise about Longman’s “general dictionary online”. I meant this one: Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English Online.
MM:
Ah yes, as in Chinese (famously): 妈 (mā “Ma”) versus 马 (mǎ “horse”). Funny how it all fits together and makes sense in the end. Apophenia redux. Leopold concerning Molly, in Ulysses at “Lestrygonians”:
I meant the LPD, and I made a mistake. Thanks!
Thank you Y, for prompting what was for me a rewarding exploration.
@drasvi: ključar
Yes of course!
Another “door security” word:
The Hungarian word for “padlock” is lakat. Apparently linked to Croatian “lokot” which itself is from Italian “luchetto”.
I can imagine medieval Italian locksmiths travelling through Croatia on their way to Hungary, selling their newfangled products along the way.
Also, is heaven a country?
At least to the extent that it has a king, and a king’s son who will pay for all, saith John Ball. Whether heaven has a queen is a disputed point.
‘
Come to think of it, I have no idea about non-white native English speakers in Africa either.
West African English speakers are definitely non-rhotic, but if they didn’t have /r/-liaison I think it would be mentioned in places like Wikipedia, and it isn’t. (IIRC, Niger-Congo languages don’t have coda /r/ either, although DE will kno better — stops and/or nasals, if anything, modulo loss of final vowels.)
Someone here in the last few weeks said that as a non-rhotic they did pronounce r-finial syllables differently than schwa-finial.
What I remember is someone saying that non-rhotics don’t think of themselves as “not pronouncing r“: if they didn’t pronounce the r in start, e.g., it would be a homonym of stat.
Surely not.
Eh? Surely not what?
I was quite surprised to learn that prayer is an American monosyllable (with DRESS).
More accurately, with DRESS vs. FACE neutralized, which is what happens before /r/ (rhotic or non-rhotic) for all the vowels. My own pronunciation is closer to FACE. In traditional prosody words like this are called hypermonosyllables, and up to the 19C poets wrote flow’r, pray’r if the meter called for it.
In personal union with the Queen of Poland.
if they didn’t pronounce the r in start, e.g., it would be a homonym of stat.
/stɑːt/ ≠ /stæt/
Exactly! By the same token, the e in fate isn’t really silent either (despite being called “silent e“). At least not in the sense that the b in debt, the a in aesthetic, and the i in parliament are.
From 1879 the title Queen of Ireland was in dispute between Alexandrina Victoria of Hannover and Our Lady of Knock. Lately Rory O’Neill has entered the contest.
By the same token, the e in fate isn’t really silent either (despite being called “silent e“).
Like Humpty Dumpty, you can of course use a word to mean just what you choose it to mean, but it must be tiring always to have to explain your usage. For almost everyone else, the r in start and the e in fate are self-evidently silent, even if they have an effect on pronunciation.
Rather, in a non-rhotic accent, palm, bath, spa, father, transport and suchlike are a handful of irregular exceptions to the rule that /ær/ is spelled (-)ar(-).
(Second) edit: …or that /ɑ/ is spelled (-)ar(-), so the r is part of a digraph and couldn’t just be dropped.
As a non-rhotic of long standing, I agree with our host. The ‘r’ in start and the ‘e’ in fate are silent. In my earliest schooldays, we were taught that the latter is a ‘magic e,’ on account of its tachyonic ability to influence the sound of a vowel that precedes it.
Having moved to Maine, I am now learning a new variant of non-rhoticity, although my attempts to master it have so far drawn mostly derision and ridicule from my Massachusettsian BFF.
isn’t really silent either (despite being called “silent e“). At least not in the sense that …, the a in aesthetic [is].
wiktionary begs to disagree with you: US variant, UK pronunciation. And my UK pron agrees with wikt.
languagehat, the first time someone told you that
you said, “Thanks, that makes a lot of sense.” Of course “not (really) silent” is a confusing way of describing this; “part of a digraph” is better.
I agree with JC’s restricted definition of “silent letter”, although of his three examples only the b in debt is unequivocal. I have often heard a hyper enunciated spelling pronunciation of parliament with /lj/ in the middle. I would not see the first half of the ae or oe ligature as silent; aside from the spelling pronunciation AntC refers to, I think it’s significant that the likelihood of FLEECE as opposed to DRESS is higher for the digraphs than for the solo e spelling. And the second e is no more silent in mete than in meet.
And the second e is no more silent in mete than in meet.
There’s clearly wiggle room in what qualifies as a silent letter in English, but I would not say that.
The “e” in “wiggle room” is silent on the right of the ell, and audible on the left. The word is not pronounced “wiggly”, but rather “wigguhl”. How odd.
For Geoff Pullum the apostrophe is a letter, so English has a 27-letter alphabet. If it is a letter, is it a silent one?
And if we don’t allow that the apostrophe is a letter in English, in Spanish is h a silent letter, or even a letter at all? It never gets a pronunciation on its own (think huevo, hacienda, alhambra), but like our b in debtor it modifies the pronunciation of other elements (in mucho, etc.). Debtor would have to be dettor, but for that b. But then, in English does a apostrophe ever – by itself, in a rule-governed way – modify the pronunciation of a word that includes it?
Is the rough breathing – ̔ , pronounced /h/ in Ancient Greek as in ἁρμονία (“harmony”) – better reclassified as a letter (and not a silent one)? And the smooth breathing ̓ as in Ἄτλας (“Atlas”)? A silent letter?
How many “silent letters” are there in the Wrights’ invention?
At the risk of making a controversial suggestion, I would like to propose that the relationship between English spelling and pronunciation is very very silly.
Silly indeed, DL. But our regimentation of the theory of English spelling had better not be silly.
To modify slightly the famous academic quip: “Silliness is silliness, but the history of silliness is scholarship.”
Then let me further suggest that the notion of a silent letter is not a productive theoretical concept. (Despite what I was taught in primary school).
you said, “Thanks, that makes a lot of sense.”
Yes, because I was responding to the entirety of a long comment where it was explained pretty thoroughly, not to a brisk “if they didn’t pronounce the r in start, e.g., it would be a homonym of stat,” which by itself didn’t work for me.
@mollymooly:
Suddenly I have a vision of Our Lady of Hard Knocks as a worthy contender to Our Lady of Perpetual Motion.
Regina Caeli, laetare …
@Noetica:
As I take it, officially h is a silent letter in Spanish, and one of the very last bastions of non-phonemic spelling. The DRAE allows sicología and nosticismo (Heaven forfend!), though mercifully not *nosis.
However, I also understand it’s not exactly true that it never gets a pronunciation. Admittedly I have no idea what they teach stage actors or whoever else is supposed to have the most academic diction, but in general (peninsular, or should I say Catalan) usage hobby (a word the DRAE admits as Spanish) seems to be pronounced closer to *jobi than *obi.
At my most tentative, I hear (but don’t know first-hand) there are regional accents that still voice h in the very many instances it’s a Latin f. In theory this should include hacienda, though I understand theoretical reasoning is a poor guide to actual pronunciation.
No idea if anyone voices the h in Alhambra, but the DRAE has alhombra as an obsolete synonym (or spelling?) for alfombra and the etymologies are typically assumed to be related.
Interesting, Giacomo.
… in general usage hobby (a word the DRAE admits as Spanish) …
There’ll be curiosities like that in all languages. When we write piña colada or Łukasiewicz in English, we are not adding extra features to the standard repertoire of our writing system; we are borrowing features to deal with denizen words:
When we write Koran as Qur’an (replacing some “proper” Unicode with an apostrophe to represent the Arabic maddah), we are according the word a more provisional passport than if we wrote Koran. And the status of our apostrophe is unchanged by our use of that expedient.
wiktionary begs to disagree with you: US variant, UK pronunciation. And my UK pron agrees with wikt.
For that to work you need someone who pronounces esthetic and aesthetic differently. Is that what you are saying of yourself? You are too elliptical for me.
. I have often heard a hyper enunciated spelling pronunciation of parliament with /lj/ in the middle.
I used to pronounce it that way myself, and I remember hearing “I grew so rich that I was sent / By pocket-borough into Parl[j]ament” on a D’Oyly Carte recording of Pinafore.
Edward Carney A Survey of English Spelling §2.6.5 divides silent letters into “auxiliary”, “inert”, and “empty” letters.
I guess it’s as easy to pronounce esthetic and aesthetic differently as to pronounce aluminum and aluminium differently.
@Noetica, you need to distinguish the use of h in a digraph like Spanish (and English) ch from its use designating a phoneme in itself. Even the most hard core h-dropping Cockney will not say /kurk/ for church.
So indeed it’s been traditional to say that ch was a unitary “letter” in Spanish, which leaves the question of the status of lone h to be decided.
The h in Spanish Hong Kong, hámster, hobby, etc. is pronounced, but no different than a j. There are always exceptions to gladden the nitpicker’s heart.
What’s going on here is that English phonology doesn’t distinguish between syllabic [l̩] and the sequence [əl]. So you get people who use one, people who use the other, and people who use both on different occasions or just at random, and few people ever notice.
What’s odd is writing wiggle instead of *wiggel. The ME verb was wiggelen, and the OED reports both wygle and wigel before settling on wigle in the 17C; the final form is not stabilized until the 19C. (Johnson does not even list the word.)
@jc
Could the spelling choice be based on examples like angel v. angle/Angle? What is the history of wygle/wigel? Can you rule out an alternation (maybe dialectal, maybe allophony) between a version with and without epenthetic schwa or with a version where the epenthetic schwa is transposed from before to after the l?
Is the history of wiggle different from all the huge number of other similar words — middle, fiddle, mingle, bangle, bottle…? Is there some way in which those spellings are not “odd” but wiggle instead of wiggel is?
I might have thought you were criticizing the whole -le convention, but when you mention the stabilization of the form in the 19C, it sounds like you’re singling this word out as a uniquely poor spelling.
Mingle in the 16C was variously mengyll, mingel, mingil, myngel, myngell, myngle as well as the modern spelling. And yes, I criticize the whole convention. I think wiggle is a pretty good example, though, because the unmodified OED1 text says “Now colloquial or dialect”, which would make me expect that its spelling would be less likely to be rationalized (and also may explain why Johnson left it out).
@John Cowan: For me, the canonical descriptions of what somebody might see with their eyes closed comes from the beginning of this 1972 track from “Having Fun with Ernie & Bert.”
When I close my eyes, I see an irregularly patterned granular background, let’s say. (The parts that aren’t black are the same faint purplish color as an afterimage.) And if it’s dark enough, I see the same with my eyes open.