The Silence of the L’s

  • The Silence of the L’s

    Guest Blogger Jane Merryman writes about the silence of the L’s:

                In the Danish language nearly 32 percent of the letters are silent. In French the number approaches 28 percent—I would have thought much more than that. About 16 percent of the letters in English words are silent. Think about it: would, could, should. And half. That l shows up in the strangest places. And then there’s wall—why do we need two l‘s there?

                I attended junior high and high school at a Catholic school for girls in Menlo Park, California. The nuns were Americans, but the religious order was French and operated schools around the world. All students, from kindergarten through twelfth grade, attended a French class every single day. By the time I graduated from high school I had advanced even into the dense forest of subjunctives. (That was when I learned English also has subjunctives, but we just ignore them.) In college I decided to branch out and signed up for Spanish. What a joy, what a relief, what an ace of a class! Every letter is pronounced. Yes, you have to get used to the fact that the j sounds like h, but you can depend on it—when you look at a word you know how to pronounce it. Much later, when I planned to travel in Italy and took evening school conversation classes, I found that Italian was much the same as Spanish. Of course there is the c gotcha— sometimes it sounds like ch, and sometimes has the hard c, or k, sound, but otherwise Italian has none of the silent letter pitfalls of French or English. Learning Indonesian also proved to be a similarly giddy pleasure. It has the same c/ch effect and, for that reason and its musical quality, is called the Italian of Asia. When I have to use a phrase I find in my handy little Indonesian Berlitz manual, I am confident I can pronounce the whole thing correctly and be understood.

                I commiserate with students of the French language. They have to learn to add silent letters to the end of many words, especially verbs. The only consonants that are pronounced at the end of French words are c, r, f, and l, the consonants in the English word careful. What a great mnemonic. I learned this lesson in one sitting. So we have avec with a final hard c sound; gentil and hôtel; pour and jour; and chef. However, tu parles (you speak) and ils parlent (they speak) are pronounced the same as je parle (I speak). Aaargh!

                As much as I feel sorry for French schoolchildren, I pity all those newcomers in English as a Second Language (ESL) classes. As if they didn’t have enough problems, they have to contend with the inconsistencies that crowd into speaking English. For every rule of grammar there are exceptions. English seems to be nothing if not exceptions, and silent letters are typical atypicalities.

                We have that pesky combination of gh. Sometimes it’s silent on the end of a word as in though. And silent in the middle of a word: blight, slight, ought. It can change the vowel sound as in bough and thought. Then it assumes a sound quite unlike its spelling, as in rough, tough, cough, trough (which can be pronounced with a final f or a th).

                There’s the curse of the final e. It’s supposed to tell us that the vowel that comes immediately before it has a long sound: hate, delete, cite, cone. We have lone, pone, and hone, but where did gone come from? Prelate and prejudice are among the words that break the rule.

                Consider the strange case of sure. In this instance a letter is missing, the h after the s. And there’s that final e. The u is not the sound of the u in dune or perfume; it’s more like an e, but not a long e, or a short e, just something like an e, but certainly not a long u. And, speaking of u, why does u have to come after q. It makes sense in quagmire but not in mystique (from the French, so of course it has silent letters!).

                Melvil Dewey was a fanatic about reformed spelling—notice the spelling of his first name. This is the same Melvil who invented the Dewey Decimal System, which is used to arrange libraries around the world. When not sorting out books, Dewey championed the elimination of extraneous letters from English words. But it never caught on. He was just regarded as a crackpot.

                            The problem of all our silent letters stems from the fact that English is a mongrel language. Anu Garg, the guru of the A.Word.A.Day website, recently explained it this way:

    If the English language were a cake, its batter would have Germanic flour. Sugar, butter, and milk would be of Norse, French, and Latin origins, not necessarily in that order. And on top of that would be icing with little flourishes here and there made up of dozens of languages—Arabic, Chinese, Spanish, Hindi, and others—it has borrowed from.

    I feel compelled to add that our condiment ketchup is a poor relation of the Indonesian spicy sauce kecap, in which the c has the ch not the k sound. I cood go on, but you wood probably be thoroly bord. And, remember, we English speakers have it easy compared to the Danes. I heard their language is impossible to learn from a book!

    Jane Merryman.1Jane Merryman specializes in copy editing: correcting grammar, spelling, punctuation, usage, and, as we say in the profession, infelicities.

    If you live in the area, join us on May 21, 2015 at Writers Forum in Petaluma, California. Jane will be a panelist on an Editors’ Forum.

    Marlene C

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  • Guest Blogger Jane Merryman titillates with ‘What’s in a Title?’

    Jane MerrymanWhat’s in a Title by Guest Blogger Jane Merryman

     Naked Lunch

    A Crack in the Edge of the World

    The Borrowers

    Book titles. Delicious. They provide entertainment in themselves, never mind what’s between the covers. The words on the front offer promise, titillation, or confusion. Of course, some titles are strictly workaday: Wildflowers of North America; The History of England from the Accession of James II; Math Formulas and Tables. But other titles are delightfully misleading, some are curiously ironic, others are satirical or even nonsense.

    A Moveable Feast

    Fezzes in the River

    Manhattan Transfer

    The title may or may not be an exact pointer to what’s inside, but it’s definitely a label that fixes itself in mind and memory. Take Pride and Prejudice—it has a lilt to it. But do you really want to plod through several hundred pages of unillustrated text enumerating the consequences of a couple of vices, or would you rather read about landing a husband? From its title, you don’t know how much you might or might not enjoy reading this book.

    As a librarian I’ve spent many hours “reading the shelves,” an actual entry on the official list of library chores. I select a block of shelves and check every book, making sure it’s filed correctly by Dewey Decimal Number, author’s last name if it’s fiction, or subject’s name for biographies. This exercise affords plenty of time to savor the mystique of the title, pushing aside what I know of the work itself. I’ve read The Great Gatsby, but to someone who hasn’t (yet), what is a gatsby? No matter, the alliteration is the hook.

    One Hundred Years of Solitude sounds as if it could get soporific really fast, but it doesn’t. Men Are Like Streetcars, Memoirs of a Geisha, and The Plague all live up to their promise. War and Peace appears to have taken on too much. A Thousand Acres seems more do-able. Nine Stories is something I could definitely finish.

    Some titles tell you right away that Things Fall Apart, The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love, and Friday the Rabbi Slept Late. At times they advise you to Play It As It Lays, to Go Tell It on the Mountain, or that You Can’t Go Home Again.

    My Family and Other Animals, Chocolat —these titles make us smile in agreement. The Lexus and the Olive Tree, A Clockwork Orange, Up the Down Staircase, A Wrinkle in Time—these fill us with consternation.

    The Naked and the Dead is one of those titles that leads us somewhat astray since it’s about the fully clothed and the living. Seeing Through Clothes might disappoint some readers with its lengthy footnoted discussion of the history of garments and fashion. Some books seem to be wanting to tell us about royalty—The African Queen, All the King’s Men, and The Prince of Tides—but they never make it to the palace.

    Authors can lift their titles from other works, such as the Bible, Shakespeare, and famous and not-so-well-known poets, and give them a resonance that sticks with us. We have East of Eden and The Sun Also Rises, For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Winter of Our Discontent, and The Grapes of Wrath. In nursery rhymes writers found When She Was Good and When the Bough Breaks. A book of travel essays went to a play to find its title, The Kindness of Strangers, which helps explain its contents, but are the others so transparent?

    Birds figure in many titles: The Maltese Falcon, The Painted Bird, Lonesome Dove, and Wild Swans. And of course mockingbirds, eagles, swallows, and blackbirds are all roosting on the library shelves, too. Little Birds, though, is not at all about ornithology.

    Titles beckon—invite us to go on a Forbidden Journey, to take The Road from Coorain, to venture Beyond the Khyber Pass, and catch The Polar Express. They offer to take us to a special place, anywhere from The House on Mango Street, to Under the Volcano, to Hiroshima, or suggest that we stroll down Revolutionary Road, Half Moon Street, and Lonely Avenue. Bridges turn up uncommonly often in titles—bridges to Terabithia, of San Luis Rey, at Toko-Ri, over the River Kwai, and on the Drina—and lead us on fraught, hardly light-hearted journeys.

    Need I go on? Haven’t you been tempted to read a book just because its title played with you? There’s a world—a universe—out there in books. Their titles might tell us exactly what is inside, what information we will tap into, what kind of adventure we will take off on. Some merely hint at the experience to come. Others don’t give us a clue, even after we’ve read the whole thing from foreword to appendix. But that doesn’t matter. Reading a shelf of titles is a pleasure in itself without even opening the books. Take Chocolat—’nuf said.

    In my opinion, though, all books should bear the subtitle Great Expectations.

    Jane Merryman specializes in copy editing: correcting grammar, spelling, punctuation, usage, and, as we say in the profession, infelicities.

    Marlene C

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