L99: THINGS DIALECTOLOGISTS SHOULD KNOW BUT MANY DON'T

THE ESTABLISHED, TRADITIONAL PRINCIPLES
FOR TRANSCRIBING AND PRONOUNCING
GREEK AND LATIN WORDS IN ENGLISH

[20070120+1]

To understand this topic, it is necessary to realize that

√ The pronunciation of Greek words is based on Mediæval Latin usage, which wrote
Hellenistic Greek ei the way the Apostles pronounced it, viz. as i.

√ The basis of the English pronunciation lies in Anglo-Saxon and Mediæval English. For
example, Anglo-Saxon and Middle English ē was used for Latin ē. Similarly pronounced
were Latin æ (in Caesar) and oe (as in foetus); like the symbol for ME short-e, despite the
appearance of the symbol for ME short-a, the unitary symbol for oe is apparently omitted
from the ignorant, inadequate, and puerile Windows symbol list.

√ ME juridical Latin was greatly influenced by Old French; see below on -tion. This and

other Old French influences affected the English pronunciation of Latin from then on.

√ When the Great Vowel-Shift took place at the creation of (what is miscalled) Modern

English, ME ē acquired the sound of ee in today's English. Other vowels were

affected in a parallel manner. Among the consonants, g occurring immediately before

the sound of i or e (long or short) acquired the sound of English j, as in Mediæval Latin; cf.
George (even though final -e, once pronounced, is now silent).

√ We no longer rhyme noûs with English mouse, the way older educated speakers did at
Cambridge and Oxford in my student years.

√ After the foregoing had taken place, that was not the end of the story. Certain Modern
English changes have taken place in due course to alter what existed. For example, what had
been a long ē changed to the Modern reflex of what had been short-e got replaced by what
had been long-e, according to a rule for vowel-loading; cf. medial and mediocrity; and what

had been short-a in station (and for some, status). The change of -ti- in -tion, -tious, -tial, -
tian, etc. reflects the Old French* origin of the words in question. In environments in
which vowel-unloading or vowel-lightening and vowel-loading could apply─cf. e in
mediocrity─the ē normally prevails because of the way the rules are ordered . . . in
the present example, the lengthening rule follows the shortening rule. Latin sine (with
both vowels short) became sīne in sine die because the i once stood in an open syllable.
In certain varieties (i.e. dialects) in certain positions, short-a ha undergone a latter-day
"broad-a" lengthening; cf. can't. An oddity is that "i" in indict and paradigm got
loaded (became long-i) in English when c and g, respectively, dropped out of the pro-
nunciation.

Change continues. Older speakers have unstressed i for "e" in -est and other inflections and in Hellen, system, problem, anthem, children, etc., where young speakers have unstressed u (or a). There are many changes going on in different parts of the English-speaking world. The reflex or earlier (stressed) short-a is now sounding like Southern States eye in some regions, and similar changes (sometimes triggered by a change like the foregoing) continue unceasingly.

Of particular interest are mispronunciations of "j" in foreign names─Chinese, Iraqi, etc. These are like English j . . . not like French j and English z in seizure. Students at the University of Firenze in my day used a sound like the long jj of English large yard or large joint in adagio, whereas people on the street of that city pronounced g (standing before e or i) like z in English seizure. (This is not a rule. At that time students in Zurich and Basel spoke the local lingo with one another, though lectures and writing were in Hochdeutsch.)

French j prevails only in languages of former French colonies in Africa. Slavic languages copy German and Scanda-navian, and Indonesian similarly copies Dutch, in using "j" for a sound similar to English y but with the tongue more tightly pressed against the hard palate to create a fricative or slightly buzzing sound. Greek Y should be transcribed as English y in hybris, hypodermic, dynamic, etc. Modern Greek gamma (g) immediately followed by a vowel having the sound of i or e sounds like German j.

One should avoid calling the use of dialect in a pejorative sense for a lower-class variant of a given regional dialect (say, Southern England, Scotland, Canadian, Australian, New Zealand, etc.) unless what is being referred to is in fact a dialect. We can speak of a specific kind of English of all classes and age groups in a region as a dialect─e.g. Midwestern English, Southern States English . . . as distinct from this or that form of Tidewater English . . . as New England English, New York City English, or New Orleans English (there are several of these).

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*English grammatical principles (except the ordering of attributive adjectives) come from Old French, as does most of the productive morphology─other than -ness and the few inflections of English (notably genitival 's), which derive from A-S. (The -th in doth and doeth could come from either OF or A-S.) The sound system of English originated in A-S. This is also what

we find today in the dozen daughter languages of today's English. In Berlin we offered a course on daughter languages of English. Taking something written and printed in all of them like the Gospel according to St. Mark, it was possible to paste them together in parallel columns and compare their features. Bislama (in Vanuatu, investigated by this writer) and Tok Pisin (in New Guinea) look like Gullah (in South Carolina); Krio (in Sierre Leone) has resemblances with the Creole spoken in Surinam and Hawai'ian Creole, and so on. Deviations like the past marker wen in the last-named─differing from the bin (or ben, from English been) found in African-derived creoles─can be explained. Thus, the Hawai'ian deviation can be explained as reversing the go that markers posteriority. Oredi or pau is used for anteriors in Pacific Creoles. Of course, the vocabulary will be mostly taken from the prestige language; e.g. Dutch in Surinam.