Occurrence of spelling pronunciations

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Occurrence of spelling pronunciations

Post by Fooge »

They seem to occur mostly in words which are often learned first in reading. For instance, "kiln" is a word that's commonly first encountered in reading and so commonly has a spelling pronunciation with a sounded "n". However that's not always the case. "often" and "clothes" have spelling pronunciations with a sounded "t" and sounded "th" for many speakers and those aren't words that people learn from reading.

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Re: Occurrence of spelling pronunciations

Post by Salmoneus »

Fooge wrote:They seem to occur mostly in words which are often learned first in reading. For instance, "kiln" is a word that's commonly first encountered in reading and so commonly has a spelling pronunciation with a sounded "n". However that's not always the case. "often" and "clothes" have spelling pronunciations with a sounded "t" and sounded "th" for many speakers and those aren't words that people learn from reading.
- "kiln" has always had /l/
- "clothes" may historically have had pronunciations where the /D/ was lost, but we've no way of knowing if those were universal. In any case, if the /D/ was restored it was probably by analogy with 'cloth' (and pairs like mouth/mouths, etc) and with "clothes" (the verb)
- "often", likewise, does have t-less variants, but there's no way to know that the t-dropped variants were ever universal, and restoration is surely at least in part by analogy, which can be a powerful restorative force in this sort of should-never-have-happened-anyway sporadic losses.

These aren't great examples of spelling pronunciation.
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Re: Occurrence of spelling pronunciations

Post by Sol717 »

Salmoneus wrote:I- "kiln" has always had /l/
It's the /n/ that's sometimes lost, not the /l/.
Salmoneus wrote:In any case, if the /D/ was restored it was probably by analogy with 'cloth'
By the time /ð/ was lost, cloth could have already had its vowel shortened.

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Re: Occurrence of spelling pronunciations

Post by linguoboy »

Fooge wrote:They seem to occur mostly in words which are often learned first in reading. For instance, "kiln" is a word that's commonly first encountered in reading and so commonly has a spelling pronunciation with a sounded "n".
I'm not sure that's necessarily true of kilns. Pottery-making is not exactly a dead art.

But that's cool, I didn't know about the loss of /n/ in much of England. This US pronunciation could be based on spelling or could also go back to dialects which preserved the /n/.

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Re: Occurrence of spelling pronunciations

Post by Richard W »

linguoboy wrote: I'm not sure that's necessarily true of kilns. Pottery-making is not exactly a dead art.
But contact may be lost with pottery-making, and with the use of kilns in general.

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Re: Occurrence of spelling pronunciations

Post by Richard W »

Sol717 wrote:
Salmoneus wrote:In any case, if the /D/ was restored it was probably by analogy with 'cloth'
By the time /ð/ was lost, cloth could have already had its vowel shortened.
This is a nitpick, isn't it? The contact is probably with clothing and the verb to clothe. Cloth and clothe have largely gone their separate semantic ways,

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Re: Occurrence of spelling pronunciations

Post by Vijay »

Richard W wrote:
linguoboy wrote: I'm not sure that's necessarily true of kilns. Pottery-making is not exactly a dead art.
But contact may be lost with pottery-making, and with the use of kilns in general.
I don't understand what this means.

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Re: Occurrence of spelling pronunciations

Post by Richard W »

Vijay wrote:
Richard W wrote:
linguoboy wrote: I'm not sure that's necessarily true of kilns. Pottery-making is not exactly a dead art.
But contact may be lost with pottery-making, and with the use of kilns in general.
I don't understand what this means.
It means that 'kiln' is not part of my everyday vocabulary. It's an unusual technical term that I can vaguely remember learning.

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Re: Occurrence of spelling pronunciations

Post by Vijay »

Richard W wrote:
Vijay wrote:
Richard W wrote:
linguoboy wrote: I'm not sure that's necessarily true of kilns. Pottery-making is not exactly a dead art.
But contact may be lost with pottery-making, and with the use of kilns in general.
I don't understand what this means.
It means that 'kiln' is not part of my everyday vocabulary. It's an unusual technical term that I can vaguely remember learning.
Pottery kilns are something I would probably be more likely to associate with my Indian heritage than with anything else.

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Re: Occurrence of spelling pronunciations

Post by linguoboy »

Vijay wrote:
Richard W wrote:It means that 'kiln' is not part of my everyday vocabulary. It's an unusual technical term that I can vaguely remember learning.
Pottery kilns are something I would probably be more likely to associate with my Indian heritage than with anything else.
I associate them with urban hippies.

Now that I think of it, the same probably applies to a lot of things.

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Re: Occurrence of spelling pronunciations

Post by alynnidalar »

I associate them with grade school art class...
I generally forget to say, so if it's relevant and I don't mention it--I'm from Southern Michigan and speak Inland North American English. Yes, I have the Northern Cities Vowel Shift; no, I don't have the cot-caught merger; and it is called pop.

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Re: Occurrence of spelling pronunciations

Post by linguoboy »

What kind of hippy-ass grade school did you go to?

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Re: Occurrence of spelling pronunciations

Post by Travis B. »

linguoboy wrote:What kind of hippy-ass grade school did you go to?
The grade schools I went to also had kilns.
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Re: Occurrence of spelling pronunciations

Post by alynnidalar »

lol, it was a very small conservative rural school in Michigan. Not a lot of hippies in sight! We did ceramics in both middle and high school art classes, it was a lot of fun.
I generally forget to say, so if it's relevant and I don't mention it--I'm from Southern Michigan and speak Inland North American English. Yes, I have the Northern Cities Vowel Shift; no, I don't have the cot-caught merger; and it is called pop.

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Re: Occurrence of spelling pronunciations

Post by kanejam »

My private primary school had a kiln. Clay was one of my favourite art thingies; my parents still have a couple mini sculptures of mine at their place. I don't know how normal that is here though. I never did art at secondary school but as far as I know there was no kiln there.
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Re: Occurrence of spelling pronunciations

Post by mèþru »

I associate kilns with the Terracotta Army. I just checked and it seems that kiln and mill rhymed in Middle English (kilne milne). The /n/ was lost in both cases but regained in kiln.
Wikipedia wrote:However, there are small bastions where the original pronunciation has endured. Kiln, Mississippi, a small town known for its wood drying kilns that once served the timber industry, is still referred to as "the Kill" by locals.
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Re: Occurrence of spelling pronunciations

Post by linguoboy »

mèþru wrote:I associate kilns with the Terracotta Army. I just checked and it seems that kiln and mill rhymed in Middle English (kilne milne). The /n/ was lost in both cases but regained in kiln.
Wikipedia wrote:However, there are small bastions where the original pronunciation has endured. Kiln, Mississippi, a small town known for its wood drying kilns that once served the timber industry, is still referred to as "the Kill" by locals.
It seems odd to call what's obviously an innovation "the original pronunciation".

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Re: Occurrence of spelling pronunciations

Post by mèþru »

What Wikipedia says is that it wasn't an innovation. Instead, /n/ at the end of kiln is an innovation as it had already been elided previously.
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Re: Occurrence of spelling pronunciations

Post by linguoboy »

mèþru wrote:What Wikipedia says is that it wasn't an innovation. Instead, /n/ at the end of kiln is an innovation as it had already been elided previously.
I understand what Wikipedia said. It was (a) inaccurate and (b) could have been better phrased.

Quoth the OED: "In Middle English the final -n became silent (in most districts)" [my emphasis]

So the loss wasn't universal. Instead, you had two pronunciations coexisting: a conservative pronunciation with /n/, which was reflected in the (eventual) standard spelling, and an innovative pronunciation without it, which wasn't. At some point, /n/ seems to have been restored to varieties at the expensive of the previously innovative pronunciation. So "original" is bad phrasing, since it makes more sense to apply it to the pronunciation predating the loss of /n/ (i.e. the pronunciation closer to the origin of the word in time), but that's the opposite of what's intended.

As I say above, you'd have to know which areas of England preserved the earlier unelided pronunciation and for how long to know how much of the prevalence of /kiln/ in the USA is the result of that spelling-influenced restoration and how much is retention. (According to your preferred resource, Kiln, Mississippi wasn't settled until the 1840s and didn't receive its name until the 1880s.)

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Re: Occurrence of spelling pronunciations

Post by mèþru »

I stand corrected inside a kiln:
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Re: Occurrence of spelling pronunciations

Post by Imralu »

I remember learning the word kiln in primary school. The school didn't have one, but at some point we made clay thingies that got sent to a kiln to be kilned in the kiln. It was kind of dumb because even though we were told to avoid air bubbles or thick parts, we were kids, so of course some people's things exploded and because they were all in the kiln together, kilning together, the shrapnel destroyed even well-made stuff so we basically got a whole lot of clay shards back. My high school art department had a kiln too.

Anyway, the main thing I remember was that most of us had problems with the /ln/ cluster. When speaking English normally, I definitely vocalise that /l/... I think I do in "film" too, even though that isn't nearly as difficult. Anyway, now I speak German, so I have enough /ln/ to get good at it.

Does anyone know of another English word with /ln/ in a coda? I can only think of the name Milne.

Also, any idea why the t is so often pronounced in "often" but basically never in thistle, castle, listen, fasten, mustn't? Is it that the FRICATIVE /t/ SCHWA /l/n/ thingy didn't happen as widespreadly with /f/ as with /s/ and held on in some dialects to respread, or there some reason that makes "often" a better candidate to pick up a spelling pronunciation?

Off topic: And why the hell isn't widespreadly a commonly used word? I can't remember what I'm supposed to say prescriptively without resorting to a longer phrase.
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Re: Occurrence of spelling pronunciations

Post by Soap »

Just saying "widely" is clear in context, I think.sorry can't comment on the rest of the post.
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Re: Occurrence of spelling pronunciations

Post by Imralu »

Soap wrote:Just saying "widely" is clear in context, I think.sorry can't comment on the rest of the post.
Ha, thanks! Sometimes my word-searching device in my head just gives up in overwhelmment ...
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Re: Occurrence of spelling pronunciations

Post by linguoboy »

Imralu wrote:Does anyone know of another English word with /ln/ in a coda? I can only think of the name Milne.
FWIW, Wikipedia gives no rhymes. I'm quite happy to delete shwas in allegro speech most of the time, but I can't think of a single instance where I elide it between /l/ and /n/.

One of my takeaways from this thread is that the surname "Milne", whose origins were long mysterious to me, is etymologically identical to "Mill".

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Re: Occurrence of spelling pronunciations

Post by zompist »

Imralu wrote:Does anyone know of another English word with /ln/ in a coda? I can only think of the name Milne.
They're pretty hard to come by, but gamers have come up with "invuln".

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