Why is SALMON pronounced SAMON by everyone???
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08-14-03, 05:48 AM
Kendor
Actually 'samon' is the spelling of the Middle English word 'Salmon' comes from. The 'l' is in the Latin version.
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08-14-03, 02:38 PM
maiku
Hi, Sam. Or should I spell your name Salm?

I pronounce the word salmon myself without any "l" in it, unless I'm trying to talk about the novelist Salmon Rushdie, in which case I do pronounce the "l."

In any number of English words, an "l" has been lost after the vowel "a." I'm willing to bet that you, too, for example, divide something in "half" without thinking about "l." I'd also bet you have a calf or two on your farm, and that the word for these rhymes with laugh (and not with Ralph. Brits who rhyme Ralph with safe can butt out of this one, but you see that they, too, have lost the "l.")

For many English speakers, this loss of "l" has gone farther than for others, particularly before a nasal, and they have no "l" in the words calm, palm, and psalm, for example, pronouncing these as "com," "pam" and "som" (and all rhyming with Tom, at least in some varieties of American English).

Why this loss of "l" should have happened is not clear at all, but happen it did!

[This message was edited by maiku on 08-14-03 at 02:46 PM.]
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08-14-03, 05:34 PM
samantha
ok guess thats true..i was looking at his can of salmon and got to thinking why do they do this in our language? Would't it be so much easier for everyone just to pronounce things the way they are spelled?? jeeze...thanks guys Roll Eyes
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08-14-03, 05:51 PM
Ewood27
Samantha, your "thanks, guys" would come out as "thanks gooeys" for a start!
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08-14-03, 05:56 PM
Wildflower63
I guess that is the beauty of the English language. Even people that speak it and are educated with it can't get it straight. I have heard that English is the most difficult languages to learn. I can sure see why!
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08-14-03, 06:47 PM
Jelp01
I'm too busy eating salmon to care how it's pronounced! Wink Razz
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08-14-03, 11:41 PM
samantha
I can tell you now English was NOT my stong point! Roll Eyes
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08-15-03, 01:48 PM
maiku

quote:

Originally posted by samantha: Would't it be so much easier for everyone just to pronounce things the way they are spelled??

Actually, Sam, it's supposed to work the other way around: ideally, the aim is supposed to be to spell things the way people really say them.

It often doesn't work out that way in the history of English because pronunciation always has tended to change faster than spelling has. Spelling is always more conservative, and this is not always a bad thing, either. The "l" in salmon was lost in the pronunciation of Middle English (about Chaucer's time), but retaining it in the spelling has the perhaps small virtue of continuing to show where the word came from.

There are other, more important reasons why a perfect correspondence between spelling and pronunciation may not only be impossible to achieve, but undesirable. Here is an example which has to do with the ugly English word phlegm. Some of you may recall the scene in "Cabaret" in which the German student of English asks why this word is spelled with a "g" in it when it is in fact pronounced "flem." The English tutor might have pointed out (but did not) that this "g" is pronounced in the derived adjective phlegmatic. Standing alone, this case doesn't demonstrate much, but put it together with a wider range of facts and you have a very good reason indeed for retaining the "g." We can establish a general pattern that g is deleted when it occurs before a word-final nasal, as in phlegm, sign, paradigm, and so on, but in other forms of the same word--phlegmatic, signal, paradigmatic--it isn't. Retaining the "g" in all forms of these words has the advantage of showing that we are still dealing with the same word, in a different shape.

I don't mind people who pronounce the "h" in vehicle (though it strikes my ear as a little bit hick) when I consider that this "h" is pronounced in my own dialect in the form vehicular.

And so on. For the reasons I'm trying to get at above, spelling reform is nowhere near as simple-minded an undertaking as some think it is. I'm not a conservative on any political questions I can think of, but I am highly conservative when it comes to English spelling.

To return, briefly, to the case of salmon: I pointed out above that it works that way also in words like half, calf, Ralph, and (for many of us) palm, calm, and psalm. I could add to this list halve and salve, both of which rhyme with have.

What I don't get myself is why valve doesn't rhyme with these. If you think it is hard to know why English works as it does, Sam, you are by no means alone.
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08-15-03, 06:04 PM
FredPuli
maiku, we are soon in foreign territory when speaking of pronunciation. In British English , in what passes for Received Pronunciation around Cambridge, we say 'palm' , 'psalm' and 'calm' as though they were 'parm', 'sarm' and 'carm'. All rhyme with 'farm'. 'Halve' is like 'harve' (as in harvest), 'salve' is as in 'salver' ( the 'sal' as in sally) and 'valve' to rhyme with salve ( the 'val' as in valley).'Halve' and 'salve' do not rhyme with 'have' here anymore than they rhyme with each other.

I do not expect everyone outside Britain ( except in France; see below)to accept this.One likes to think that they will do so . I shall not be betting on it. Smile

An attempt at the phonetics here: I see that in the phonetic alphabet Le Robert & Collins ( the standard English-French dictionary produced jointly by Collins and Dictionnaires Le Robert from the respective countries) has 'calm', 'psalm','palm' and 'farm' exactly the same for the 'alm' part.Likewise with 'valve' , 'salve', 'salver' and 'sally' together and the same with 'halve' and 'harvest' together, the relevant sound is given identically . 'Have' has a different vowel sound from 'halve'; the vowel sound is that of 'valve'. (Sorry, I've no OED here in Antibes;I never thought it needed; Collins will surely serve).

[This message was edited by FredPuli on 08-15-03 at 06:20 PM.]
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08-15-03, 06:37 PM
samantha
I hate English...That is one subject that I understood the least in school..I know its necessary but do things have to be so darn hard? Roll Eyes
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08-15-03, 06:48 PM
maiku
The only thing that surprises me about the pronunciation you report as your own in the words mentioned above Fred, is that you apparently retain an "l" in the word "salve." I do not, and I think most of my countrymen do not. However, we do mostly also retain the "l" in "salver" (which, as you know, has nothing to do with "salve" anyway).

Your pseudo-phonetic spellings "parm," "sarm," and "carm" for palm, psalm, and calm, respectively, are way, way off, Fred. I'm morally certain you have not converted the "l" to an "r" in your pronunciation of these words. The "r" you write in these transcriptions would be more correctly represented as a colon, indicating a compensatory lengthening of the preceding vowel because of the loss of the "l," just as in American English, in fact.

The use of an extraneous "r" after a vowel in impressionistic spellings of British pronunciations of certain words is itself a topic worthy of comment. There is no "r," really, in the British pronunciation of "ma'am" in the compound "schoolmarm," for example, though we are now stuck with this mistake, I suppose, as a spelling pronunciation. A.A. Milne's donkey, Eeyore, is called that because he said "e-yaw," like all good donkeys do, and drew out the final vowel. He had no "r" in his speech, either. Finally, when Lisa Doolittle sings "Wouldn't it be loverly" in "My Fair Lady," the "r" really ought to show only that she pronounces it with three syllables instead of the standard two. There is no "r" in the standard Cockney pronunciation of "loverly." (Just as there is no "r," Fred, in your own assuredly non-Cockney pronunciation of words like palm, psalm, and calm.
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08-16-03, 02:09 AM
Ewood27
Maiku, the problem for those of us who are not as familiar with the minutiae of phonetics is that we have to find another way to express sounds. Like Fred, I say palm, psalm and calm to rhyme with "farm", but none of these words has a "r" sound in it when spoken (in British English, of course).

"Ma'am" can have two pronunciations, either as in "schoolmarm" or more like "madam" with the central "d" removed, leaving two short "a"s, the first being stressed, and no noticeable "stop" between the two. It still comes out as one syllable. "Loverly" has indeed no "r" sound - and neither does "fair"!

Perhaps we British do use "r" to indicate sounds which do not contain an actual "r" sound to a much greater extent than you across the Pond - while using the "r" sound itself a lot less. Small wonder there's confusion.

As to the original question, "salmon" may have lost its "l" sound, but "salmonella" (nasty little beast) keeps all of its.
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08-16-03, 03:18 AM
FredPuli
Maiku, Just remember that the sound in our 'psalm' is like the one in Derby ! Big Grin

I'd toyed with writing 'pahm','cahm' and so on instead but thought I'd get just as much flak as in writing 'parm'; it would just be different in target! As you are concerned, I should say that there is indeed a colon in the phonetic rendering of the sound in the dictionary; I can't reproduce the 'a' as it is like a cursive 'a' in some handwriting not 'a'.

It does occur to me that it would be easier for you to look in a British English dictionary , such as the OED or Collin's ,for the words set in the phonetic alphabet than for any of us who happen to be English to attempt to replicate them. I do not have the font nor do I have the knowledge of the technicalities.It is all a bit of a bore ( goes with Eeyore) don't you think ? All I do is speak it, not dissect it. On speaking it I do claim to be something of an authority; the knowledge has come from field work , I suppose one could say . Big Grin
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08-16-03, 11:34 AM
maiku
Unfortunately, there is little uniformity in the way various dictionaries transcribe speech sounds. But in the International Phonetic Alphabet, the standard British pronunciation of palm and farm is [p^ha:m] and [fa:m], respectively. Does the "a" you mentioned look anything like those? (The symbol a above isn't quite right. It is shaped like this alpha, but with a vertical line on the right side and no curly tails. This is as close as I could come and still have the symbol display correctly here.)

The above pronunciation of palm is widespread in America, too. Far less frequently, Americans also rhyme farm with palm. The dialects of these speakers, which are found mostly close to the Atlantic seaboard, are sometimes called r-less in dialectology. They don't really lose the "r" altogether, it's just that it is replaced, after a vowel, by a centralizing glide very much like the one you have in Britain.
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08-16-03, 12:45 PM
FredPuli
That's yerman, maiku. It's that "alpha" plus colon plus 'm'. 'Have' has what's seen in some words of Greek origin e.g. 'gynaecology'. We write 'ae' but the traditional printer would fuse the a and e; it's that version of it.It looks like 'haev'. It's almost needless to say that 'ae' is rendered as i' or something like it in 'gynae-' !

Do these symbols have names ? Do etymologists and linguists never have to dictate using them ? Imagine trying to describe them all if there are none ! Smile
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08-16-03, 01:23 PM
maiku
The IPA symbol for the vowel in have (yours and mine) is æ.

The character is based on a rune which was called ash, and it still goes by that name. For me and most other Americans, have and halve both have this vowel and both rhyme with salve.

Take a look at the third definition under the first entry for ash in the M-W linked conveniently above on this page.

[This message was edited by maiku on 08-16-03 at 01:38 PM.]
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08-17-03, 08:34 AM
maiku

quote:Originally posted by FredPuli:
Do these symbols have names ? Do etymologists and linguists never have to dictate using them ? Imagine trying to describe them all if there are none ! Smile



My previous answer, dealing with the character æ (or ash) was not entirely responsive, it occurs to me, to the part of Fred's question I've cited above, so here are a few more general comments, just in case anyone is interested.

The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) uses virtually all of the normal lower-case characters of the Roman alphabet, and many of its upper-case characters, too (but with a different meaning--it is a case-sensitive alphabet). When these symbols have the expected phonetic values, their usual names as letters can serve perfectly well. But languages normally have a far larger inventory of sounds than can be represented with the 26 letters of the alphabet, and many additional symbols are needed, especially when you consider that the point of the IPA is to provide a means of transcribing accurately all possible human languages.

Occasionally, characters with traditional names, such as ash, have been adapted, and these names can be used too, of course. Another character used by Anglo-Saxon scribes which is a standard symbol in the IPA is edh (written ð) .This symbol represents the voiced interdental fricative spelled with th in English words such as either. Interestingly enough, the M-W dictionary linked conveniently above makes a mistake in its discussion of edh. It is not used to represent the voiceless variety of th in words like ether. That particular sound is represented instead by the symbol q, which, of course, we might as well call theta.

The majority of symbols in the IPA (or other phonetic alphabets) do not have convenient names at all. This is of no theoretical significance whatever, and hardly of any practical significance, either. A phonetic alphabet is really only a convenient shorthand, and of course it will be truly meaningful only to those who have bothered to learn it. This is not very hard to do, by the way, and I recommend, to anyone with a real interest in language, the reading of some standard textbook on phonetics to become familiar with it.

Far more important than names of symbols is the system of descriptive terminology which linguists use. This terminology is based sometimes on articulation, sometimes on acoustics, and sometimes on a combination of both. What the optimal taxonomy of possible human speech sounds is, or even should be, is a question of great theoretical interest to linguistics, and it is no trivial question, either. It can also have important implications in fields like speech recognition, for example.

[This message was edited by maiku on 08-17-03 at 08:43 AM.]
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08-18-03, 01:28 PM
maiku
Looking again at the entry for edh in the M-W dictionary (linked conveniently above), I see that I was wrong to accuse these fine lexicographers of a mistake (at least in this instance).

It appears that they do systematically (sort of, anyway), distinguish the voiced fricative [ð] as in English either from the voiceless one [q] as in ether. They write the latter as th and the former either as [th] or merely th, depending on whether you follow their own transcription under the entry itself or look at their pronunciation table at the bottom of the entry.

So at most they are guilty of a little confusion, which makes my own confusion on this point pardonable, I hope. Their confusion and mine underscores, in fact, the point that it would be better if there were greater uniformity in transcribing sounds among makers of dictionaries.

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