A spelling pronunciation is a pronunciation that, instead of reflecting the way the word was pronounced by previous generations of speakers, is a rendering in sound of the word's spelling. Spelling pronunciations compete, often effectively, with the older traditional pronunciation.
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In some cases, we cannot tell if a pronunciation is a true spelling pronunciation. The alternative is that a word is being pronounced analogically, in essence as the "sum of its parts". Thus, forehead is commonly pronounced as a sequence of fore plus head, instead of the historically earlier "forrid"; and waistcoat is commonly pronounced as a sequence of waist and coat, instead of the historically earlier "weskit".
Analogy in this sense (also known as recomposition) can be confused with reanalysis. For example, inmost comes from Old English innemest, which contained the ordinary superlative suffix -est. The later switch to in + most was due to reanalysis of -mest as -most (and led to the creation of a whole family of words of relational meaning: northernmost, outermost, uppermost, etc. Foremost is unusual in this group in having much the same history as inmost, being from OE fyremest, superlative of the word giving modern English former).
Spelling pronunciations give rise to varied opinions. Often those who retain the old pronunciation consider the spelling pronunciation to be a mark of ignorance or insecurity. Those who use a spelling pronunciation may not be aware that it is one, and consider the historically authentic version to be slovenly, since it "slurs over" a letter. Conversely, the users of some innovative pronunciations such as "Febuary" (for February) may regard the historically (and phonetically) authentic version as a pedantic spelling pronunciation.
Fowler reports that in his day there was a conscious movement among schoolteachers and others encouraging people to abandon anomalous traditional pronunciations and "speak as you spell". According to major scholars of early modern English (Dobson, Wyld et al.), already in the 17th century there was beginning an "intellectual" trend in England to "pronounce as you spell". This of course presupposes a standard spelling system which was in fact beginning to form at that time. A fascinating example of this is the vowel sound in words like clerk, merchant, mercy, heard, learn and many, many more rather commonly used vocabulary. It is obvious (from spellings used in letters, etc.) that even the highest society (e.g. Queen Elisabeth herself) were using the -ar vowel in many such words, but within 200 years such pronunciations, if they mismatched the traditional spelling, were considered by many to be vulgar, and the "correct" i.e. spelling pronunciation has only become evermore accepted even up to this day, with very few exceptions such as clerk (but "corrected" in American pronunciation). Similarly, quite a large number of "corrections" slowly spread from scholars to the general public in France, starting several centuries ago.[1]
Others would argue that this trend, though understandable from a socio-psychological point of view, is, from a strictly linguistic perspective, irrational, since writing was invented to represent the sounds of the language and not vice versa. According to this belief, there is no good reason to "speak as one spells", but there are many good reasons to "spell as one speaks", i.e. to reform the orthography of a language whenever it does not render its pronunciation clearly and unambiguously – which is the task of a writing system. How easy such a reform would be in practice is of course quite another matter.
A different variety of spelling pronunciations are phonetic adaptations, i.e. pronunciations of the written form of foreign words within the frame of the phonematic system of the language that accepts them: an example of this process is garage ([ga'ʀa:ʒ] in French) sometimes pronounced as ['gæɹɪʤ] in English. Such adaptations are quite natural, and often preferred by speech-conscious and careful speakers.
Children who read a great deal often produce spelling pronunciations, since they have no way of knowing, other than the spelling, how the rare words they encounter are correctly pronounced. Well-read second language learners are likewise vulnerable to producing spelling pronunciations.
However, since there are many words which one reads far more often than one hears, the problem also affects adult native-language speakers. This, in turn, leads to the language evolution mentioned above. What is a spelling pronunciation in one generation often becomes standard in the next.
In French, the first vowel in oignon (onion) is, anomalously, /o/, where general principles would lead one to expect [wa]. The reason is that the spelling of this word is a holdover from the 17th century, when "i" was invariably inserted before "gn": montagne was spelled "montaigne", but pronounced in the same way as today. However, there are provincial school-teachers who insist on pronouncing oignon with a [wa]Template:Fact. (The French Academy has recently (1975) decreed an official change in spelling to ognon.)
When English club was first borrowed into French, the approved pronunciation was /klab/, as being a reasonable approximation of the English. Now the standard is /klyb/ (Littré, though Larousse and Oxford prefer /klœb/), on the basis of the spelling. Similarly, shampooing "product for washing the hair" at the time of borrowing was /ʃɑ̃puiŋ/; now it's /ʃɑ̃pwε̃/
In Hebrew there is a vowel called patach genuvah, consisting of an "a" sign placed underneath a final guttural but pronounced before it: an example is ruach, which looks as if it ought to be *rucha. Where the final consonant is a sounded he (h), many speakers do indeed place the vowel after it, mistakenly pronouncing Eloah (God) as "Eloha" and gavoah (high) as "gavoha". Other examples of spelling pronunciations are the Sephardic "kal" and "tsahorayim": see Sephardic Hebrew language.
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