pronunciation

Fun Facts About English #87 – Capitonyms

11/05/2020 by admin

A capitonym is a word that changes its nuance, meaning, and sometimes pronunciation when it’s capitalized; capitalization being applied due to one form being a proper noun, such as Bill/bill, or an eponym, such as Augustus/august. Some capitonyms are homonyms (Rose/rose), and others can be heteronyms (Polish/polish, Tangier/tangier) where pronunciation changes accordingly. The word capitonym is a portmanteau of the word capital with the suffix -onym.

Besides the list of first names above, last names that are capitonyms often fall in the realms of labor, colors, and animals, like baker, cook, farmer, brown, white, green, wolf, fox, and parrot. When first meeting people with such surnames, best to spare them your witticism.

Capitonyms may or may not be etymologically related in their capitalized and un-capitalized forms. The month of May and the verb may don’t share an etymology, whereas Catholic and catholic both derive from a Greek adjective meaning “universal.”

Capital letters can be used to differentiate a set of objects or people and an example of that set, like a moon and the Moon, a dad and Dad, or a bible and the Bible.

Religious contexts have very specific rules for capital spelling. The general word god is capitalized to God when referring to the deity of monotheistic religions. When referencing said deities, common pronouns like me, mine, you, and yours are usually capitalized as well. Within the liturgy, there is Mass as opposed to physical mass, and church denoting a building compared to Church when referring to members of a religious group. In the same lofty vein, words carrying a meaning of transcendence, religious or secular, are often capitalized, such as Truth, Beauty, and Justice.

Because political parties are often named after political philosophies, capital letters differentiate one who supports a philosophy, such as a conservative believing in a philosophy of conservatism, and one who claims herself a Conservative in support of the Conservative Party.

Finally, there’s one pesky little glitch in the English scheme to differentiate capitonyms: the beginning of a sentence. Consider the mental sort and the necessity of context and punctuation when reading these examples:

Bill the patient, please.
Turkey requires a visa.
Rusty waters plants.
Crystal is clearly delicate.
Nice winters are mild compared to Paris.
Cook wages war in court.
Iris blossoms on the piano.
Pat the dog.
Will Will?
March!
Randy?

If you enjoyed this post, you might also be interested in reading about palindromes, the conundrum with contronyms, or why the word widow is unique among gender-specific nouns!

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Stories for Young Readers is a graded textbook series for students studying English as a second language (ESL/EFL). The series presents English in clear, grammatically simple, and direct language. Most importantly, the textbooks have been designed to extend students’ skills and interest in developing their ability to communicate in English. Visit Donald’s English Classroom for pdf downloads, or purchase through the Kinney Brothers Publishing website!

Fun Facts About English #79 – The Letter Z

10/24/2020 by admin

In most English-speaking countries, including the United Kingdom, Canada, India, Ireland, New Zealand, Zambia, and Australia, the name of the letter Z is zed, pronounced /zɛd/. Zed takes its name via French and Latin from the Greek equivalent, zeta. In American English, its name is zee /ziː/. Zee is thought to have originated from a late 17th-century British dialect and influenced by the bee, cee, dee, ee pattern of much of the alphabet.

This British dialectical form was likely what the English Puritan minister and author, Thomas Lye [Leigh, Lee], was drawing from when he published his New Spelling Book in England in 1677; the full title of which is:

A New Spelling Book, Or, Reading and Spelling English Made Easie: Wherein All the Words of Our English Bible are Set Down in an Alphabetical Order and Divided Into Their Distinct Syllabls

At the time of its publishing, Britain was home to a variety of dialectical pronunciations of the letter Z that included zed, zod, zad, zard, ezod, izzard, and uzzard. Samuel Johnson, in his highly influential Dictionary of the English Language published in London in 1755, referenced izzard as the name of the letter. In King Lear, 150 years earlier, Shakespeare had used zed.

Beginning in the 1600s, zee and other British pronunciations made the voyage across the Atlantic to colonial America. By 1883, British historian, Edward Augustus Freeman, noted that zee was mainly found in (formerly Puritan) New England, while zed was the accepted form in the American South. Areas such as Philadelphia vacillated between the two. He also noted that not a few Americans still used izzard, a fact that tickled his British funny bone.

Nonetheless, by the 19th century, zee became firmly established in the U.S. with several important developments. New England born, Noah Webster, published his own American Spelling Book in 1794 with the letter “ze.” In 1828, Webster also published A Compendious Dictionary of the English Language asserting the pronunciation of the letter Z as “zee.” Finally, “The Alphabet Song,” copyrighted in 1835 and published by Boston-based music publisher, Charles Bradlee, rhymed Z with “me.”

FYI: The tune of “The Alphabet Song” is based on the 18th-century French song “Ah, vous dirai-je, maman” and popularized by Mozart. The melody is also used in other children’s songs such as “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” and “Baa, Baa, Black Sheep.”

It’s worth noting that, like zee, Webster also defined the standards of American spelling for words like theater for theatre and honor for honour,” spellings that were not invented by Webster himself. These were spelling variants in use in the English language, including in Britain. Webster simply chose to institute one variation as a standard.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, Britain was undergoing a similar change, namely a push-back against izzard and its variants. Sticking with the etymological legacy of its French origins (zéde), zed became enshrined as the proper name of the letter in British English.

Finally, it’s important to remember, unlike most major languages in the world, English has never had a regulatory body that governed its use – anywhere nor at any time. As for slinging tired arrows at the U.S. for its “unilateral” divergence from British English, let’s reflect on the idea that even today, in a country the size of Louisiana, England has over 40 dialects (compared to 24 in the whole U.S.) and a long legacy of myriad spelling and pronunciation variations. Over several centuries and 4000 miles apart, the notion of a culturally freeze-dried, correct language and orthography simply didn’t exist, on either side of the pond.

You might also be interested to learn why North Americans pronounce R differently than the British, why rooster is the preferred euphemism in American English, or why English has no language academy!

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Fun Facts About English #34 – Orange

12/04/2019 by admin

Fun Facts About English 34 Kinney Brothers Publishing

To understand the pronunciation of the Old English word ġeoluhrēad, one must understand Old Saxon and its orthographic translation from Germanic runes into Latin script. For example, the Old English ġ could be pronounced like y in the word yes. The diphthong ēa would have been pronounced as a short e as in bread. So, even to contemporary English speakers, it is likely ġeolu (yellow) and rēad (red) would be understood as yelu-red.

Kinney Brothers Publishing English timeline

It would, however, be a mistake to assume the absence of a single word for orange was due to a cultural lack in perceptual nuances. There were two combinations of words in Old English to refer to orange. One included crog, the common word for saffron. Orange was called ġeoluhrēad (yellow-red) for reddish-orange and ġeoluhcrog (yellow-saffron) for yellowish-orange.

Which came first, the fruit or the color?

Portuguese merchants brought the first orange trees to Europe from Asia in the late 15th and early 16th centuries. The English name of the fruit comes from the Old French word pomme d’orange. The French word, in turn, is from the Italian word arancia, based on the Arabic word nāranj, which was acquired from the Sanskrit word nāraṅga (नारङ्ग). So, to dispel any arguments, the word for the color orange was derived from the fruit and not the other way around.

The first instance of the English word orange being recorded as a color is found in a description for clothing purchased for Margaret Tudor, Queen of Scots, in 1502.

So, now you know.

Did you know the word scientist wasn’t coined until 1834? Why do Americans say /zee/ and the rest of the world says /zed/? An early spelling of Chicago was Stktschagko! Do you have Dimples of Venus or Morton’s Toe? There’s so much to learn on the Kinney Brothers Publishing blog!

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Trends: Business and Culture Reports, Book 1 and Book 2, bring you sixty topical Business Reports that will entertain, inform, and prompt your adult intermediate and advanced students toward lively discussions. These texts are also available as full pdf downloads in Donald’s English Classroom.

Fun Facts About English #33 – Latin Script

11/29/2019 by admin

Kinney Brothers Publishing Latin Script and English

The Latin script that we know today originated in the 7th century BC and is the most widely used alphabetic writing system in the world. Also known as Roman script, it is derived from Greek and Etruscan alphabets. In the Middle Ages, the Roman script replaced the runic alphabet of the Anglo-Saxons and is often referred to as simply the “alphabet” – a Latin combination of the first two Greek letters alpha and beta.

letter transformations Kinney Brothers Publishing Latin Script and English

Old English as a spoken language was a form of West Germanic dialects. It was first written in a runic alphabet brought with Anglo-Saxon settlers starting in the 5th century. Very few examples of this form of written English have survived, most being short inscriptions or fragments.

Franks Casket KInney Brothers Publishing Latin Script and English

The Latin script was introduced by Christian missionaries from about the 7th century. It began to replace the Anglo-Saxon runes though the two continued in parallel for some time. As such, the Old English alphabet began to employ parts of the Roman alphabet in its construction.

English Kinney Brothers Publishing Latin Script and English

The adopted Roman alphabet was made up of 23 letters that included Etruscan characters plus the Greek letters Y and Z. The English names of the Latin letters are, for the most part, direct descendants via French, Latin, and Etruscan. At the time, there were no lower case letters and they wouldn’t appear until the 9th century.

The combination of upper case and lower case letters in a dual alphabet system first appeared in a form of writing named after Emperor Charlemagne (742-814). It soon became very common to mix the cases within a word with the upper case to add emphasis.

In the year 1011, a monk named Byrhtferð recorded the order of the English alphabet with a combination of Latin, modified Latin, and Old English characters. He first listed the 23 letters of the Latin alphabet plus the ampersand. Additional characters included the Latin shorthand symbol for and (⁊), the Old English letters Ƿ and Þ, and finally, the modified Latin letters Ð and Æ.

ABCDEFGHIKLMNOPQRSTVXYZ& ⁊ǷÞÐÆ

The letters J, U, and W weren’t included in the alphabet until the 16th century. In Roman numerals, J was originally used as a swash variation of the number I when multiple I’s appeared together, as in XXIIJ. Likewise, U and V were one and the same, the only difference being the pointed v form was written at the beginning of a word, while a rounded u form was used in the middle or end of a word. The shift from the digraph VV or double u to the distinct ligature W was gradual. Though considered a separate letter by the 14th century, W remained an outsider with complaints that few knew what to do with it.

Finally, the seventh Greek letter Z (zeta) had been adopted from Etruscan as part of the original Roman alphabet but was replaced with the letter G, only to be added again to the end of the list in the 1st century BC. Z was rarely used simply because it is not a native Latin sound. Old English adopted the Roman alphabet after Z had been recast as the last letter.

As for the name of the letter Z, the older pronunciation of zed was inherited from Old French. The American zee was also a British English dialectal form during the 17th century and was likely influenced by the pronunciation pattern bee, cee, dee, pee, tee, etc. The pronunciation zee was given its American stamp of approval by Noah Webster in his American Dictionary of the English Language in 1828.

You might also be interested in learning more about the Greek alphabet, the language of the ancient gods, the origins of lord, lady and other gender nouns, or what a fossilized word is!

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