Quote:
Originally Posted by Tiki
I don't know how you pronounce "Minuscule", but the way I pronounce it would make "Miniscule" phonetically incorrect, compounding the problem you're complaining about.
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I would like to revisit this point because Tiki has made a good point that I would like to expand upon.
Some people do pronounce "minuscule" as if it was spelt "miniscule". For such people, a "miniscule" spelling makes more sense which is why that spelling is seen so often. We have a similar situation already with the two spellings
aluminium and
aluminum: the two spellings correspond to different pronunciations. What generally happens with this word is that one would assign one's own pronunciation to both spellings. The extra or missing
i doesn't cause trouble.
Tiki's point about "compounding the problem" may be reasonable or in error, depending on the exact approach to spelling reform that would be chosen. Tiki appears to have made an implicit assumption that words with really bizarre spellings would not be remedied, such as
colonel (the
l is pronounced like "r") and
lieutenant (with the British pronunciation of "leftenant" where the "u" is pronounced "f"). If such words were not remedied, the problem is indeed increased. However, it is possible that such words would be scrutinized and new alternative spellings proposed. This would be more likely to lead to a net reduction of words with spellings that do not correspond to a plausible pronunciation of the word.
The two words
colonel and
lieutenant have an interesting history which explains their unusual pronunciation in relation to their spellings.
Colonel is a 16th-century borrowing of an obsolete French word
coronel (note the spelling). This in turn was borrowed from an Italian word
colonnello (note the spelling) meaning a column of soldiers. If the word was spelt as it was borrowed from the French, it would be spelt
coronel: it would still be a little tricky to spell the vowels but at least the consonants would all be correct. The word appears to have been hypercorrected to have an
l rather than an
r to correspond to the Italian origins. While this is where the word does come from, it is not from the Italian that the word was borrowed but from the French, where the pronunciation of the word appears to have changed between the borrowing from Italian and the reborrowing into English. I feel that if the spelling of a word is to reflect its origins, it should reflect the spelling in the language from where the word was borrowed, and not attempt to trace the word all the way back as far as we can because such efforts to trace a word are sometimes speculative and subject to error.
So far as I can tell,
lieutenant intentionally had its pronunciation changed by the English so as to put some distance between the word and its French origins. While the word has been in the English language, the English have fought a few wars with the French and my understanding is that it is during one of these wars (possibly the Napoleonic wars) that the pronunciation was changed. Before the 17th century,
u did double duty as vowel and consonant, so the word was pronounced as if spelt "levtenant" (with the
i being silent). The following voiceless consonant
t appears to have devoiced the
v, giving the "leftenant" pronunciation that the British use today. I do not know the origins of the more logical American pronunciation, but it appears that the Americans have retained the older pronunciation (if the word did change during the Napoleonic war). The pronunciation of this word in Australian English is altogether more bizarre: the pronunciation follows British English or American English depending on which branch of the armed forces that the officer is serving in.