Neuroscientists tell us that more of the brain's "real estate" is dedicated to vision than to any of our other senses. Apparently, we depend more on sight than on sound, smell, taste, or touch to get around in the world and to survive its capricious, and often vicious, vicissitudes. There is one area, however, in which this is patently not true: pronunciation in American English.
Americans depend far more on what they hear than on what they see for cues as to how English words are to be uttered. This is largely because America is not fundamentally a reading nation, literacy is at an all time low, and the education system espouses new-fangled approaches to the teaching of reading, such as the demonstrably futile method of "phonics." In what follows, I shall attempt to demonstrate, using specific examples, how American pronunciation is driven by what is heard rather than by what is seen.
But before I do that, however, I should acknowledge that language (whether American English or any other language) is fundamentally a spoken activity. The "orality" of language makes it also inescapably "aural." Far more verbal utterances are produced than words written or printed or typed. That might be changing in the new Digital Age in which we live, an age in which family members text each other from room to room within the same house. Nevertheless, the predominance of oral production in linguistic communication is a poor argument for mispronunciation in American English. If Americans were taught the correct pronunciation in the first place, the problem of "endemic mispronunciation" would not arise. ("Endemic mispronunciation" refers to non-idiosyncratic mispronunciation, that is, mispronunciation that is not specific to specific individuals but occurs across the board as part of the linguistic practice of the community of speakers.)
Having said that, we are now ready to examine and substantiate the claim that American pronunciation represents a triumph of sound over sight.
There are several words in American English whose pronunciation is patently at odds with their American spelling. This is indeed a peculiar phenomenon, given that Americans, from very early on in their history, and going at least as far back as Noah Webster (1758-1843), have prided themselves on making English spelling consistent with pronunciation and vice versa. It is this mania for consistency that led, for example, to the pronunciation in American English of "lever" to rhyme with "never" rather than with "fever" as it originally was and still is in all other forms of English. Oddly enough, Americans find nothing inconsistent about not pronouncing "fever" to rhyme with "never." I have still to hear an American say: "I have a fev-ver." Even Noah Webster, that great champion of consistency, did not advocate this "correction," as far as I am aware.
The mania for consistency appears to have abated in recent years. Consider, for example, the word "asphalt." In American English it is widely pronounced ash-fault. An outside observer would quite naturally ask (in sheer puzzlement): "By what logic do you get from the spelling "asphalt" to the pronunciation ash-fault. Possibly three phenomena appear to be at work here in the morphing of "asphalt" into ash-fault. First, some American somewhere (now lost to history) who was not familiar with the word and had never heard it pronounced before perhaps glanced carelessly at it, saw an "h" in it and, in a transposition of sorts, associated the "h" with the "s" to produce ash. Second, he or she may have subconsciously rationalized this unconscious transposition by making an association to the very familiar word "ash." This is a phenomenon that I have called Approximation to the Nearest Known. In Approximation to the Nearest Known, when a person encounters something unfamiliar (the "unknown"), he or she instinctively and subconsciously associates it with the thing that it bears the closest resemblance to in his or her existing repertoire (the "known"). The unknown is thus approximated to the nearest known. If asphalt is unknown to me, but ash is known, I am very likely to associate "asphalt" with "ash," especially since "as-" is not a known prefix and I have not encountered the sound combination "asf" before (though it does in fact exist in words such as "asphodel"—unfortunately even rarer than "asphalt"). Third, this unfortunate American individual uttered his version of "asphalt" in the presence of some other equally uninformed American individual, who immediately picked up the pronunciation and "ran with it." This third step repeated itself ad infinitum until there were thousands and even hundreds of thousands of Americans who were going around talking about "ash-fault." This last phenomenon is that of mimesis, a term that can refer broadly to any kind of imitation or copying, but is used here specifically to denote the imitation or copying of another person's speech patterns. Mimesis lies at the root of the triumph of sound over sight in American pronunciation.
It would be fair to say that no intelligent person familiar with English orthography who actually saw the word "asphalt" in print (or on a computer screen) and looked at it carefully, would conclude that it is pronounced ash-fault. There is simply no "h" after the "s" that would justify ash. If that is true, then we have to conclude that the vast majority of Americans either haven't seen this word spelled out in print, or if they have, they have not taken the trouble to look at it carefully. They have relied on what they have heard rather than on what they have seen. Contrary to biology, sound has trumped sight.
Defenders of American pronunciation may object that this is an isolated example. But is it, really? Let's take a closer look.
Consider the word "nuptial." It has become part of the common American vocabulary in recent years as a result of the tabloid fascination with the pre-nuptial agreements of sundry divorced and divorcing celebrities. The word is almost universally pronounced nup-chew-ul in American English, and the contagion is now spreading to other parts of the English-speaking world through the good offices of the American mass media. Once again, we have a mismatch between pronunciation and spelling. There is no "u" after the "t" to justify chew after nup. The word has always been pronounced nup-shill (compare "initial", which is pronounced in-nish-shill, even in American English), until ignorant Americans, even supposedly highly educated ones, came along and started saying "nup-chew-ul".
A similar insertion of the "u" sound is found in the American jew-b'you-lay-shin for "jubilation" (correctly pronounced jew-bill-ay-shin). Where is the "u" after the "b" that would justify b'you? And again in the ubiquitous noo-cue-ler (sometimes devolving into new-killer or noo-killer) for "nuclear"—though many educated Americans, to their credit, rightly heaped scorn on George W. Bush for using this utterly ignorant way of pronouncing the word. Despite this scorn-heaping, noo-cue-ler can be heard far and wide across the American spectrum, from holders of Ph.D.s down to high-school dropouts, and Bush himself, in the face of continued ridicule, refused to change the way he pronounced the word, displaying typical defiance until the bitter end of his public life. Apparently, the vast majority of Americans simply do not care that there is no "u" after the "c" in "nuclear" to justify cue as the second syllable of the word. One wonders what became of the mania for consistency that originally led American English to diverge from the mother language.
The insertion of imaginary letters and sounds (or the substitution of existing letters or sounds with imaginary ones) is by no means the only way in which American pronunciation flouts American spelling. False assumptions and false analogy based on ignorance also contribute to the phenomenon. Take, for example, the American pronunciation ass for the word "arse." No one who ever saw this word in print would ever imagine that it should be pronounced ass. Sight belies sound, but sound still trumps sight in American English. Not only has the pronunciation changed, but the word itself is spelled "ass" in American English, a usage that is now spreading to other parts of the world. How does one account for the substitution of "ass" for "arse" in American English. The most plausible explanation is that Americans heard British speakers say the word "arse" (pronounced ah-erse in British English), not ever having actually seen this word spelled out in print, and assumed (falsely) that it was the hoity-toity British way of saying "ass," on analogy to "glass," which the Americans pronounce to rhyme with "ass," and "master", which the Americans pronounce mass-ter, and so on. A similar application of false assumptions and false analogy was perhaps at work in the evolution of the American ant for "aunt," the analogy here being to the American cant for the British cah-ernt ("can't"). There is no precedent, even in American English, for pronouncing "au" in this way. Once again, the ah in the British pronunciation of "aunt" was falsely analogized to "master," "glass," and so on and was "back-formed" into the short vowel aa. Ant for "aunt" does, of course, present a problem for the claim that seeing the word spelled out would immediately make Americans aware that they were mispronouncing it. There can be no doubt that millions of Americans have seen "aunt" spelled out in print. But this actually reinforces the claim that Americans would rather believe their ears than their eyes: "Who cares how it's spelled? Everyone says 'ant', so why shouldn't I?"
False analogy may also have come into play in the generation of noo-cue-ler (mentioned earlier in connection with insertion of letters and sounds). In this case, the analogy would have been to words that end in the "-cular" sound, such as "circular," "spectacular," "particular," and so on. False analogy is, of course, closely associated with the principle of Approximation to the Nearest Known. The word "nuclear" was relatively unknown in common American usage until the environmental movement forced the American public's attention to alternate sources of energy. "Atomic" was the word used in the popular media until relatively recently, as in references to the "atomic" bomb and "atomic" energy. As an unknown entity, the word "nuclear" when it first appeared on the scene, was quickly and spontaneously approximated to the nearest known words in the American repertoire, the ones listed above and others like them.
False analogy can be quite insidious. It often takes place by stealth, under the surface of consciousness, and in such a way as to go by unnoticed. Consider the American en-thoo-zee-ist for "enthusiast." This is clearly based on a false analogy to words containing the "-ist" suffix, such as "artist," "columnist," "federalist," and so on. If Americans actually saw "enthusiast" spelled out in print, and looked at it carefully, they would realize that it does not contain the suffix "-ist" at all. The suffix in this case is the less familiar "-ast." A similar false analogizing gave rise to the American gym-nist for "gymnast." Oddly enough, we do not hear Americans say ped-a-wrist for "pederast" or eye-con-a-clist for "iconoclast." But it must be remembered that these are extremely "rare" words and are not part of the vocabulary of rank-and-file Americans in the way that "enthusiast" and "gymnast" are. I would not be surprised if most Americans who say en-thoo-zee-ist and gym-nist are completely unaware that they are mispronouncing these words, or even that their pronunciation does not match the spelling. I would not be surprised to hear them insist vehemently that there was nothing at all wrong with their pronunciation. Such is the insidious nature of false analogy. But it must be noted that the conviction on the part of Americans that their pronunciation of these words is correct comes largely from the fact that they have heard these words pronounced as such thousands (and perhaps even millions) of times by people they know and trust. And what could be truer for Americans than that old cliché, made popular by American advertising, that "millions of Americans can't be wrong"?
[To be continued …]
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