Saturday, July 9, 2011

Pronunciation of COLONEL

Mailbag
An occasional segment wherein TileHead responds to reader questions and comments.  You can contact TileHead by email at <tilehead@gmail.com> or by leaving a comment on a blog story or a Facebook post.

From the mailbag:
Curran Eggertson sent in the following query: I always wondered, what's the story behind COLONEL's pronunciation?

TileHead responds:
Good question!  Both the whims of early spelling and the laziness of pronunciation come into play with COLONEL.

The word derives from the Italian colonnella ("commander of a column of soldiers"), but there were two early forms in English, via French: COLONEL and CORONEL. The former is more etymologically correct, but the latter was common for a while, especially in speech.  Eventually the COLONEL spelling won out, but the "cor'nel/kernel" pronunciation remained.

Another factor is that COLONEL is awkward to pronounce as it is spelled, especially those nearby L's.  In this respect, the pronunciation of COLONEL is a good example of the linguistic characteristic known as DISSIMILATION, in which similar nearby sounds in a word tend to become pronounced differently, or in which one of the similar sounds is dropped completely.  This happens in Romance languages most frequently with nearby L's and R's, with R-R dissimilation being most common in English.  For example, the Latin turtur became the English TURTLE, and the Latin purpura became the English PURPLE; for more modern examples, think of how some people say "lib'ary" for LIBRARY, "supprise" for SURPRISE, "tempature" for TEMPERATURE, and so on.  The pronunciation of COLONEL is a rare case of L-L dissimilation that endured and eventually became the "correct" pronunciation.

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