Let's write about how we pronounce English words

English is full of letters we write but don’t pronounce. 

The inferiority complex that put silent letters in English spelling.
An echo essay by Arika Okrent*, published in the History News Network (HNN). 

Silent consonants got into English in a few ways. One group of them, the gnat-comb-wrist-should kind, was there in the beginning and simply kept hanging around, after we stopped pronouncing them. Another group, the pneumatic-psychiatric-mnemonic kind, came in with scholarly words coined or borrowed by scholarly people using spellings from scholarly classical languages. 

A similar group, words of the rendezvous–faux pas–gnocchi type, were borrowed with their fancy continental spellings and maintained to display their fancy foreign origins.

Most silent consonants belong to one of those groups, but there is another group: silent consonants that were not there when they became English, but were added later to emphasize their high class
origins. They were consciously added in response to a linguistic inferiority complex.

After the Norman invasion of 1066, replaced English with French as the language of official business, English went into decline as a written language. Most of the population continued to speak English, but the social class that had maintained it as a written language--nobility, landholders, clergy--had been replaced. Latin was the language of religion and erudition. French was the language of government and high culture.

A few centuries later, the Normans had become thoroughly English. English slowly came back into writing and, especially after the printing press started churning out books, English began to flourish as a written language. But it had been dormant for a long time, so while it was robust and healthy as a spoken language, there was no trusted authority or tradition to follow when writing it. That wasn’t such a problem at first, as there was great variety in the way people approached style and spelling, but soon people felt the need for some direction.

In the sixteenth century, English was held to be deficient to Latin and Greek, which learned people still studied in school. However, most of the growing reading public wanted books in English. Authors obliged but often prefaced their English works with defensive justifications for why they were writing in English and apologized for how, as one translation noted, “our grosse tongue is a rude and barren tong.”

There was a movement to bring the rude and barren tong up to snuff with some conscious attention. Writers not only began borrowing loads of Latin words like describe, deduce, and conclude, they also started going overboard with so-called inkhorn terms, Frankensteins they built from Latin pieces like addubitation (the act of doubting oneself) and honorificabilitudinitatibus (the state of being able to achieve honor). 

But one of the more subtle ways this urge to raise up English to a more Latin level was to add extra letters to existing words.

Receipt, salmon, and doubt came into English through French and were at first spelled in various ways that approximated how they were pronounced. Receipt (recette in modern French) might be receit, resayt, or recyte. Salmon (saumon in modern French) could be samoun, samowne, or samon. Doubt (doute in modern French) was spelled doute, dote, or even doughte in old texts.

If you were in the know— well-educated and familiar with Latin— you could see that these words traced back to the Latin words that had developed into the French words over the previous centuries. The related Latin words, receptus, salmo, and dubitare, had some extra consonants in them, but they had stopped being pronounced in French and weren’t pronounced or written in English.

But they could be! If you wanted to play up your familiarity with those classical origins, you could stick them back in. During the Renaissance, writers and translators started using more and more Latin words in order to enrich the vocabulary or just show off. They borrowed words straight from Latin like receptive and dubious. And older words that were distant relatives of those were recast in a Latin mold. Receipt gained a p, doubt gained a b, and salmon got its l.

They weren’t the only ones. Dette became debt. Endite became indict. In most cases, the Latin-inspired interloper letters remained silent, but sometimes putting them back in writing made literate people eventually start pronouncing them too. Perfect first entered English in the c-less French way, as parfit. In the late sixteenth century the Latin connection to perfectus was made explicit in the spelling, but it wasn’t until much later that people started to actually pronounce the c. Even a hundred years later it was often
pronounced as perfet. 

Something similar happened to adventure, which came in as aventure, and falcon, which was long pronounced faucon.

In a few cases, the urge to Latinize spellings made etymological connections that were never there in the first place. Iland, for example, was from an Old English word, igland, but in the late sixteenth century it gained an s to become island on the mistaken assumption that it had something to do with Latin insula.

Likewise sithe, from an Old English word for a cutting implement, became scythe on the assumption that it had some connection to the Latin scindere, for cut (which is a valid root in the word rescind). Scissors (formerly sisours) also got its c from a mistaken scindere assumption.

Latinized spelling was haphazardly applied and didn’t always stick. While receipt held on to its mute p, deceit could have just as well become deceipt, but though a few writers tried that out, it didn’t take. Other Latinized forms like sainct for saint (better to see the sanctus) and hable for able (connecting it back to habilis) also died on the vine.

So we’re left with silent letters that only sometimes give us a little peek at the distant history of words and where we got them. We did get a lot of words from Latin, but sometimes we forged the receipts.

Okrent was born in Chicago to parents of Polish and Transylvanian descent and was fascinated by languages since an early age.

*Arika Okrent holds a PhD in Linguistics and Psychology and writes on language. Her book Highly Irregular: Why Tough, Through, and Dough Don't Rhyme—And Other Oddities of the English Language will be released by Oxford University Press on July 1.

When a bridge transcends literature and time

The Brunswick-Topshamm Maine "The Swinging Bridge" with Roebling Ropes suspension- art in engineering.

There is a picturesque bridge in Brunswick Maine called "The Swinging Bridge". This bridge was constructed with a purpose to create a footbridge from Topsham Maine across the Androsgoggin River to Brunswick (and back to Topsham), for Franco-American workers to use, because they were needed to provide labor for the Cabot Mills and other manufacturing plants that were reliant on hydropower.

The Swinging Bridge is historic because it was designed by John Roebling and the suspension is supported by Roebling Ropes. This is the same engineering concept as was used to construct the famously picturesque Brooklyn Bridge, in New York.

I have reported on the historic preservation of Brunswick and Topsham "The Swinging Bridge" for over 20 years, as in my blog link in this report.

Therefore, I was pleased to read this review about a new biography about Robeling, published in the History News Network. Although The Swinging Bridge in Brunswick-Topsham Maine is not mentioned in this particular HNN article, I have posted the link to my article to the CUNY Twitter announcement about the biography:
Bangor Daily News:
http://francoamerican.bangordailynews.com/2019/08/09/franco-american-news-and-culture/androscoggin-swinging-bridge-franco-american-mill-workers-history/

History News Network- engineer Roebling in literature

by Richard Haw

Spiritualism and Suspension Bridges: John Roebling and a Biographer's Sympathy for the Weird 19th Century

John Roebling was one of the nineteenth century's most brilliant engineers, ingenious inventors, successful manufacturers, and fascinating personalities. Raised in a German backwater amid the war-torn chaos of the Napoleonic Wars, he immigrated to the US in 1831, where he became wealthy and acclaimed, eventually receiving a carte-blanche contract to build one of the nineteenth century's most stupendous and daring works of engineering: a gigantic suspension bridge to span the East River between New York and Brooklyn. (And the Brunswick, Maine "The Swinging Bridge).

Richard Haw is a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY, and the author of the newly released Engineering America: The Life and Times of John A. Roebling (Oxford UP), as well as The Brooklyn Bridge: A Cultural History and Art of the Brooklyn Bridge: A Visual History.

Two things that have often seemed in short supply in our national politics over the last few years are a respect for history—not just the lessons it can teach us, but what forces and factors drove those lessons—and empathy for the people stuck in that history.

People live their lives situated in time and space and are forced to make choices with the knowledge and context available to them. They are often fooled or foolish—also often astute or fortunate—but there are usually sound reasons for the way people act, whether we agree with them or not. Keeping that in mind is what makes the job of a biographer such a humbling practice.

About eleven years ago, I set out to write my first biography, of John Roebling, the man who designed the Brooklyn Bridge. Roebling’s life seemed grand and exciting, full of ideas and incident. Born in Prussia, he attended Hegel’s lectures in Berlin, emigrated to the US to start a utopian farming community in rural Pennsylvania, wrote passionately of his abhorrence of slavery, and went on to become one of the nineteenth century’s greatest engineers and manufacturers, and certainly its greatest bridge builder. He built bridges over the Niagara Gorge (over which Harriet Tubman transported formerly enslaved people to Canada) and over the Ohio at Cincinnati (the first structure to link a Northern with a Southern state after the Civil War). He had just begun the colossal New York and Brooklyn Bridge—one of the greatest engineering feats of the nineteenth century—when a random accident at the bridge site claimed his life.

I thought Roebling was a genius. He could wrestle thousands of tons of wood, granite and iron into beautiful and intricate bridges, far longer and sturdier than anyone else on the planet could. He combined advanced mathematics and physics with the eye of artist and a master craftsman to produce sublime artifacts of the industrial age, great icons of the nineteenth century.

I also thought he was a complete weirdo. Roebling believed in spirits; wrapped himself up in a wet sheet before going to bed (a friend of mine thought my book should be called “More Wet Sheet”: The Life and Times of John A. Roebling); assiduously attended séances; ate his own bodyweight in charcoal; treated himself with cold running water when he had tetanus; thought he could ward off cholera by pacing up and down repeating “I have it not, I have it not!”; created huge long lists of things he wouldn’t eat, including nearly all fruits and vegetables, which he seemed to think were somewhat toxic; believed in Odic Force, that space was a substance (“ether”), and that the afterlife consisted of seven spheres of existence that you slowly worked through to get to the final state, disarmingly named Summerland.

This all seemed so rich and wonderful to a first time biographer. The guy was clearly bonkers and it would be such fun to rake over it all, I thought.

But I don’t see him as a weirdo now, even though much of what he believed we would now call mumbo jumbo. And I have no interest in poking fun at him, laughing at his failings (ok, maybe a chuckle about the wet sheet), or wallowing in my superiority. I have learned, I think, the first lesson of biography: that we need to take people on their own terms, not on ours. And Roebling’s terms were the nineteenth century, not the early twenty first.

The nineteenth was an age of invention, belief, and exploration. People believed they could find answers to everything, Roebling more so than most. He was at heart an ideas man. He had thousands over the course of his life. Most missed the mark in one form or another, but some didn’t, and those ideas helped change the face of a nation. His views on medicine may strike us as misguided and delusional but the medical profession had barely entered its infancy by the mid-nineteenth century. To one degree or another almost all ideas about medicine were wrong. (The doctor attending Roebling’s brush with cholera blamed the disease on “the epidemic constitution of the air,” “high heat and humidity,” and “soil poison,” for example.) But the point was not so much the accuracy as the effort at understanding itself.

Roebling’s life and beliefs showcase a society struggling to reconcile the rising influence of science with the declining authority of faith and religion, a hallmark of the nineteenth century and a process we mistakenly regard in hindsight as linear. Yet even for someone like Charles Darwin, shrugging off religion was the work of a lifetime, “like confessing a murder,” he wrote his good friend Joseph Hooker. Beliefs were in flux. New knowledge was created at a bewildering pace, much of which refused to sit easily next to established ideas. A surprisingly large number of prominent Americans—judges, journalists, abolitionists, historians, military officers, politicians, businessmen, and poets—took to spiritualism, for example, precisely because of this. In a climate of change and creation, new things seem possible and within reach: new ways to build, communicate, and think; new places, materials, and laws to discover; even perhaps communing with the dead. In this, the nineteenth century was a time of optimism, but also of huge loss. War, disease, and large-scale migration separated family members, often forever, as it did with Roebling, who lost a beloved child in infancy, had a son fight in the Civil War, and never saw any of his immediate family after leaving Europe when he was twenty-four. This confluence of discovery and loss fed the spiritualist movement, which in turn reflected the age in which it appeared. If the religious impulse represents the search for answers in the face of profound grief, then spiritualism offered a comforting, plausible solution to a bewildering era that took away as much as it promised. Spiritualism sought to bring science into the world of faith: to make the afterlife a verified, observable fact. We might scoff at a nation as taken with séances as hard science but it’s entirely possible that, during Roebling’s life, more people believed in spirits than suspension bridges.

Roebling, of course, believed in both.

Roebling was a believer and a scientist. He belonged to the blurred line that ran straight through the nineteenth century, shaping its unsteady but inexorable march. Roebling helps us remember that the achievements of industry and engineering—what we take to be the triumphs of applied reason—are often created by people with a decidedly different perspective on the world than our own.

He is also a reminder that people can be many things, and that contradictions aren’t always as clear as with hindsight. Arthur Conan Doyle—the mind behind literature’s most rational brain—was a doctor, ophthalmologist and botanist who studied at one the UK’s most prestigious medical schools. He was a full-throated advocate of vaccinations. He also believed in fairies.

Roebling’s achievements in applied science stand in somewhat stark contrast to his ideas about other branches of the natural arts. But his failings in this regard aren’t his own alone: they belong to the times, just as his successes do. One might also say they weren’t even failings at all. We think of people like John Roebling as embodying great contradictions but they are only contradictions to us. They weren’t contradictions to him or to others of his era. Instead they were the creaks and groans of a culture working things out, moving itself forward in time and in understanding, trying its messy best to incorporate new aims and new ideas into an existing order.

The nineteenth century is not our century. It’s easy to judge but harder to understand, which is why we need to have empathy for those that lived in and through it. We have the gift of hindsight. They had only the unknown.

General Dwight Eisenhower on June 6, 1944 - historic narrative

"Nazism and its attendant evils— barbarism, unprecedented genocide, the enslavement of tens of millions of Europeans—might yet prevail..."

Anyone who has had the privilege to visit the beaches in Normandy, in France, will find this historic excerpt to be particularly compelling.  By reading this, I can feel the tension in the room where General Eisenhower made his final invasion decision. 

The D-Day Warriors Who Led The Way to Victory in World War ll

A History News Network (HNN) essay, by Alex Kershaw

From THE FIRST WAVE: The D-Day Warriors Who Led The Way to Victory in World War ll by Alex Kershaw, published by Dutton, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2019 by Alex Kershaw.

The clock in the war room at Southwick House showed 4 a.m. The nine men gathered in the twenty‐five‐by‐fifty‐foot former library, its walls lined with empty bookshelves, were anxiously sipping cups of coffee, their minds dwelling on the Allies’ most important decision of World War II. Outside in the darkness, a gale was blowing, angry rain lashing against the windows. “The weather was terrible,” recalled fifty‐three‐year‐old Supreme Allied Commander Dwight Eisenhower. “Southwick House was shaking. Oh, it was really storming.” Given the atrocious conditions, would Eisenhower give the final go‐ahead or postpone? He had left it until now, the very last possible moment, to decide whether or not to launch the greatest invasion in history.

Seated before Eisenhower, in upholstered chairs at a long table covered in a green cloth, were the commanders of Overlord: the no‐nonsense Missourian, General Omar Bradley, commander of US ground forces; the British General Bernard Law Montgomery, commander of the 21st Army Group, casually attired in his trademark roll‐top sweater and corduroy slacks; Admiral Sir Bertram Ramsay, the naval commander who had orchestrated the “miracle of Dunkirk”—the evacuation of more than 300,000 troops from France in May 1940; the pipe‐smoking Air Chief Arthur Tedder, also British; Air Chief Marshal Sir Trafford Leigh‐Mallory, whose blunt pessimism had caused Eisenhower considerable anguish; and Major General Walter Bedell Smith, Eisenhower’s chief of staff.

Tribute- General Eisenhower statue at Bayeux, in France

A dour and tall Scotsman, forty‐three‐year‐old Group Captain James Stagg, Eisenhower’s chief meteorologist, entered the library and stood on the polished wood floor before Overlord’s commanders. He had briefed Eisenhower and his generals every twelve hours, predicting the storm that was now rattling the windows of the library, which had already led Eisenhower to postpone the invasion from June 5 to June 6. Then, to Eisenhower’s great relief, he had forecast that there would, as he had put it with a slight smile, “be rather fair conditions” beginning that afternoon and lasting for thirty‐six hours.

Once more, Stagg gave an update. The storm would indeed start to abate later that day.

Eisenhower got to his feet and began to pace back and forth, hands clasped behind him, chin resting on his chest, tension etched on his face.

What if Stagg was wrong? The consequences were beyond bearable. But to postpone again would mean that secrecy would be lost. Furthermore, the logistics of men and supplies, as well as the tides, dictated that another attempt could not be made for weeks, giving the Germans more time to prepare their already formidable coastal defenses.

Since January, when he had arrived in England to command Overlord, Eisenhower had been under crushing, ever greater strain. Now it had all boiled down to this decision. Eisenhower alone—not Roosevelt, not Churchill—had the authority to give the final command to go, to “enter the continent of Europe,” as his orders from on high had stated, and “undertake operations aimed at the heart of Germany and the destruction of her armed forces.” He alone could pull the trigger.

Marshaling the greatest invasion in the history of war had been, at times, as terrifying as the very real prospect of failure. The last time there had been a successful cross‐Channel attack was 1066, almost a millennium ago. The scale of this operation had been almost too much to grasp. More than 700,000 separate items had formed the inventory of what was required to launch the assault. Dismissed by some British officers as merely a “coordinator, a good mixer,” the blue‐eyed Eisenhower, celebrated for his broad grin and easy charm, had nevertheless imposed his will, working eighteen‐ hour days, reviewing and tweaking plans to launch some seven thousand vessels, twelve thousand planes, and 160,000 troops to hostile shores.

Eisenhower had overseen vital changes to the Overlord plan. A third more troops had been added to the invasion forces, of whom fewer than 15 percent had actually experienced combat. Heeding General Montgomery’s concerns, Eisenhower had ensured that the front was broadened to almost sixty miles of coast, with a beach code‐named Utah added at the base of the Cotentin Peninsula, farthest to the west. It had been agreed, after Eisenhower had carefully managed the “bunch of prima donnas,” most of them British, who made up his high command—the men gathered now before him—that the attack by night should benefit from the rays of a late‐rising moon.

In addition, it was decided that the first wave of seaborne troops would land at low tide to avoid being ripped apart by beach obstacles. An elaborate campaign of counterintelligence and outright deception, Operation Fortitude, had hopefully kept the Germans guessing as to where and when the Allies would land, providing the critical element of surprise. Hopefully, Erwin Rommel, the field marshal in charge of German forces in Normandy, had not succeeded in fortifying the coast to the extent that he had demanded. Hopefully, the Allies’ greatest advantage—their overwhelming superiority in air power— would make all the difference. Hopefully.

Not even Eisenhower was confident of success. “We are not merely risking a tactical defeat,” he had recently confided to an old friend back in Washington. “We are putting the whole works on one number.” Among Eisenhower’s most senior generals, even now, at the eleventh hour, there was precious little optimism.

Still pacing, Eisenhower thrust his chin in the direction of Montgomery. He was all for going. So was Tedder. Leigh‐Mallory, ever cautious, thought the heavy cloud cover might prove disastrous.

Stagg left the library and its cloud of pipe and cigarette smoke. There was an intense silence; each man knew how immense this moment was in history. The stakes could not be higher. There was no plan B. Nazism and its attendant evils— barbarism, unprecedented genocide, the enslavement of tens of millions of Europeans—might yet prevail. The one man in the room whom Eisenhower genuinely liked, Omar Bradley, believed that Overlord was Hitler’s “greatest danger and his greatest opportunity. If the Overlord forces could be repulsed and trounced decisively on the beaches, Hitler knew it would be a very long time indeed before the Allies tried again—if ever.”

Six weeks before, V Corps commander General Leonard Gerow had written to Eisenhower outlining grave doubts, even though it was too late to do much to alter the overall Overlord plan. It was distressingly clear, after the 4th Division had lost an incredible 749 men—killed in a single practice exercise on April 28 on Slapton Sands—that the Royal Navy and American troops were not working well together. Apart from the appallingly chaotic practice landings—the woeful yet final dress rehearsals—the defensive obstacles sown all along the beaches in Normandy were especially concerning.

Eisenhower had chided Gerow for his skepticism. Gerow had shot back that he was not being “pessimistic” but simply “realistic.” And what of the ten missing officers from the disaster at Slapton Sands who had detailed knowledge of the D‐Day operations, the most important secret in modern history? They knew about “Hobart’s Funnies,” the assortment of tanks specially designed to cut through Rommel’s defenses—including flail tanks that cleared mines with chains, and DUKWs, the six‐wheeled amphibious trucks that would take Rangers to within yards of the steep Norman cliffs—and they knew exactly where and when the Allies were landing. Was it really credible to assume that the Germans had not been tipped off, that so many thousands of planes and ships had gone unseen?

Even Winston Churchill, usually so ebullient and optimistic, was filled with misgivings, having cautioned Eisenhower to “take care that the waves do not become red with the blood of American and British youth.” The prime minister had recently told a senior Pentagon official, John J. McCloy, that it would have been best to have had “Turkey on our side, the Danube under threat as well as Norway cleaned up before we undertook [Overlord].” The British Field Marshal Sir Alan Brooke, chief of the Imperial General Staff, had fought in Normandy in 1940 before the British Expeditionary Force’s narrow escape at Dunkirk. Just a few hours earlier, he had written in his diary that he was “very uneasy about the whole operation. At the best it will fall so very, very far short of the expectation of the bulk of the people, namely all those who know nothing about its difficulties. At the worst it may well be the most ghastly disaster of the whole war!”

No wonder Eisenhower had complained of a constant ringing in his right ear. He was almost frantic with nervous exhaustion, but he dared not show it as he continued now to pace back and forth, lost in thought, listening to the crackle and hiss of logs burning in the fireplace. He could not betray his true feelings, his dread and anxiety.

The minute hand on the clock moved slowly, for as long as five minutes according to one account. Walter Bedell Smith recalled, “I never realized before the loneliness and isolation of a commander at a time when such a momentous decision has to be taken, with the full knowledge that failure or success rests on his judgment alone.”

Eisenhower finally stopped pacing and then looked calmly at his lieutenants.

“OK. We’ll go.”