Authors: Bill Bryson
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.
All of this is by way of coming around to the somewhat paradoxical observation that we speak with remarkable laxness and imprecision and yet manage to express ourselves with wondrous subtletyâand simply breathtaking speed. In normal conversation we speak at a rate of about 300 syllables a minute. To do this we force air up through the larynxâor supralaryngeal vocal tract, to be technical about itâand, by variously pursing our lips and flapping our tongue around in our mouth rather in the manner of a freshly landed fish, we shape each passing puff of air into a series of loosely differentiated plosives, fricatives, gutturals, and other minor atmospheric disturbances. These emerge as a more or less continuous blur of sound. People don't talk like this, theytalklikethis. Syllables, words, sentences run together like a watercolor left in the rain. To understand what anyone is saying to us we must separate these noises into words and the words into sentences so that we might in our turn issue a stream of mixed sounds in response. If what we say is suitably apt and amusing, the listener will show his delight by emitting a series of uncontrolled high-pitched noises, accompanied by sharp intakes of breath of the sort normally associated with a seizure or heart failure. And by these means we converse. Talking, when you think about it, is a very strange business indeed.
And yet we achieve the process effortlessly. We absorb and interpret spoken sounds more or less instantaneously. If I say to you, “Which do you like better, peas or carrots?” it will take you on average less than a fifth of a secondâthe length of an eye blinkâto interpret the question, consider the relative merits of the two vegetables, and formulate a reply. We repeat this process hundreds of times a day, generally with such speed that often we have our answer ready before the person has even finished the question.
As listeners we can distinguish between the most subtle gradations of emphasis. Most people, if they are reasonably attentive, can clearly detect the difference between
that's tough
and
that stuff,
between
I love you
and
isle of view,
and between
gray day
and
Grade A
even though the phonics could hardly be more similar. Sometimes, however, precise diction proves elusive, particularly when there is no direct eye contact. (It is remarkable the extent to which we read lipsâor at least facial expressions.) Every newspaper person has his or her favorite story involving slipups resulting from misheard dictation. I remember once while working on an evening newspaper in southern England receiving a wire service story that made absolutely no sense until a correction was sent a few minutes later saying: “In the preceding story, for âCrewe Station' read âcrustacean.'â” In a similar way, pilots long had difficulty in distinguishing between
five
and
nine
until someone thought to start using the more distinct
fiver
and
niner.
Germans, suffering a similar problem with
zwei
and
drei,
introduced the nonce word
zwo,
for two, to deal with such misunderstandings.
Despite these occasional drawbacks, listening is something we do remarkably well. Speech, by contrast, is a highly inefficient process. We are all familiar with the feeling of not being able to get the words out fast enough, of mixing up sounds into spoonerisms, of stumbling over phonetically demanding words like
statistics
and
proprietorial.
The fact is that we will never be able to speak as quickly as we can hear.
Hence the tendency to slur. There has been a clear trend over time to make our pronunciations less precise, to let letters lapse into silence or allow sounds to merge and become less emphatic. This happened with
-ed
endings. In Chaucer's day,
helped
was pronounced not “helpt” but “hel-pud,” with the two syllables clearly enunciated. By Shakespeare's time, poets could choose between the two to suit their cadenceâwriting helped to indicate the historic pronunciation or help'd to signify the modern one.
Such pronunciation changes are a regular feature of language. Sometimes they occur with the speed of centuries, sometimes with seemingly hell-for-leather haste. They appear from time to time in all languages for reasons that no one really understands. German had one not long after the departure of the Angles and Saxons to Britain, which resulted in the division of German into High and Low varieties. In the German shift, northern speakers came to place
s
's where before they had put
t
's, and to put
f
's where previously they had employed
p
's. These changes were of course too late to affect English, and thus explain the differences in many modern English and German words, such as
water
and
wasser
and
open
and
offen.
Such changes are by no means unique to English or even the Germanic languages. Latin underwent a prolonged series of changes. In the fourth century, to take one example, the Latin
centum
(hundred) began to be pronounced in various waysâa fact reflected in the modern French
cent,
“sent,” Spanish
ciento,
“thiento,” and Italian
cento,
“chento.” By such means did the Romance languages grow.
In England the Great Vowel Shift, as it is generally and somewhat misleadingly called, happened later, roughly around the time of Chaucer. Textbook discussions of the shift can sometimes leave us with the impression that people pronounced their vowels in one way up to a certain date and then suddenly, as if on a whim, began pronouncing them in an altogether different way. But of course it was never as simple as that. Many of the pronunciation changes reflected changes that had begun centuries before in the time of King Alfred and some of them are not complete to this day. (
Shove
and
move
may one day be pronounced in the same way; it would make sense.) So, although it is true to say that these constituted some of the most sudden and dramatic changes English had ever undergone, we should not lose sight of the fact that we are talking about a period that spanned, even at its most rapid, a couple of generations. When Chaucer died in 1400, people still pronounced the
e
on the end of words. One hundred years later not only had it become silent, but scholars were evidently unaware that it ever
had
been pronounced. In short, changes that seem to history to have been almost breathtakingly sudden will often have gone unnoticed by those who lived through them.
No one knows why this vowel shift happened. As Charlton Laird has succinctly put it: “For some reason, Englishmen started shoving tense vowels forward in their mouths. Then they stopped. And they have remained stopped. Nobody knows why they started or why they stopped.” For whatever reasons, in a relatively short period the long vowel sounds of English (or tense vowels as Laird called them) changed their values in a fundamental and seemingly systematic way, each of them moving forward and upward in the mouth. There was evidently a chain reaction in which each shifting vowel pushed the next one forward: The “o” sound of
spot
became the “a” sound of
spat,
while
spat
became
speet, speet
became
spate,
and so on. The “aw” sound of
law
became the “oh” sound of
close,
which in turn became the “oo” sound of
food.
Chaucer's
lyf,
pronounced “leef,” became Shakespeare's
life,
pronounced “lafe,” became our
life.
Not all vowels were affected. The short
e
of
bed
and the short
i
of
sit,
for instance, were unmoved, so that we pronounce those words today just as the Venerable Bede said them 1,200 years ago.
There were other changes as wellâmost notably the loss of the Old English sound
x,
the throat-clearing sound of the
ch
in the Scottish
loch
or the German
ach.
The loss of this sound from English meant that others rushed to fill the vacuum, as in the Old English word
burh
(place), which became variously
burgh
as in Edinburgh,
borough
as in Gainsborough,
brough
as in Middlesbrough, and
bury
as in Canterbury.
Before the shift
house
was pronounced “hoose” (it still is in Scotland),
mode
was pronounced “mood,” and
home
rhymed with “gloom,” which is why Domesday Book is pronounced and sometimes called Doomsday. (The word has nothing to do with the modern word
doom,
incidentally. It is related to the
domes-
in
domestic.
) But as with most things, shifting vowel sounds were somewhat hit or miss, often because regional variations disrupted the pattern. This is most notably demonstrated with the “oo” sound. In Chaucer's day in London, all double
o
words were pronounced to rhyme with the modern word
food.
But once the pattern was broken, all kinds of other variations took hold, giving us such anomalies as
blood, stood, good, flood,
and so on. Most of these words were pronounced in different ways by different people from different places until they gradually settled into their modern forms, although some have never truly settled, such as
roof
and
poof,
which some people rhyme with
goof
and others pronounce with the sound in
foot.
A similar drift with “ove” accounts for the different sounds of
shove, move,
and
hove.
Since obviously there is no one around who heard English as it was spoken in the time of Chaucer and Caxton, how do we know all this? The answer is that for the most part we cannot know for sure. Most of it is based on supposition. But scholars can get a good idea of what English must have sounded like by looking at the rhymes and rhythms of historic verse and by examining the way words were spelled in letters and other snatches of informal writing. In this respect we owe a huge debt to bad spellers. It is from misspellings in letters of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries that we can be pretty certain that
boiled
was pronounced
byled,
that
join
was
gine,
that
merchant
was
marchant,
and so on. From the misspellings of Queen Elizabeth we know that
work
was once pronounced “wark,”
person
was “parson,”
heard
was “hard,” and
defer
was “defar,” at least at court [cited by Lincoln Barnett, page 175]. In the same period, short vowels were often used interchangeably, so that
not
was sometimes written
nat
and
when
sometimes appeared as
whan.
Relics of this variability include
strap
and
strop, taffy
and
toffy, God
and
gad.
Rhymes too tell us much. We know from Shakespeare's rhymes that
knees, grease, grass,
and
grace
all rhymed (at least more or less) and that
clean
rhymed with
lane.
(The modern pronunciation was evidently in use but considered substandard.) Shakespeare also made puns suggesting a similar pronunciation between
food
and
ford
and between
reason
and
raising.
The
k
in words like
knight
and
knave
was still sounded in Shakespeare's day, while words like
sea
and
see
were still pronounced slightly differentlyâ
sea
being something roughly halfway between
see
and
say
âas were other pairs involving
ee
and
ea
spellings, such as
peek
and
peak, seek
and
speak,
and so on. All of this is of particular interest to us because it was in this period that America began to be colonized, so it was from this stock of pronunciations that American English grew. For this reason, it has been said that Shakespeare probably sounded more American than English. Well, perhaps. But in fact if he and his compatriots sounded like anything modern at all it was more probably Irish, though even here there are so many exceptions as to make such suggestions dubious.