Blooming English by Kate Burridge

Author:Kate Burridge
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2002-01-10T21:00:00+00:00

Clearly, we’ve been shortening words for ages. And we’ve been sneering at shortened forms for ages, too. Words like bus, cab, taxi, wig and pants were all once slangy versions of the more respectable omnibus, cabriolet, taximeter, periwig and pantaloons. But they sound quite proper now. Language change is only ever odious when it’s happening under your nose.

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Maroon – how do you pronounce it?

Many people have queried the pronunciation of the word that describes a certain brownish-crimson colour. Is it ‘merone’ or ‘meroon’?

The etymology is quite straightforward. Maroon entered English during the sixteenth century, originally from Italian but, like so many of our colour words, via French. The word in French is marron and in Italian marrone, both meaning ‘chestnut’. You would imagine the word came into English with the pronunciation closest to the French or Italian original and that the ‘meroon’ pronunciation you now hear in most of the English-speaking world is the result of sound change. Certainly, there was a vowel shift that changed long ‘o’ to ‘oo’ (as happened to goose). According to this scenario, the pronunciation ‘merone’ would be closest to the original before the shift began, and would therefore be some sort of dialect relic form.

Not so. As plausible as this theory sounds, the chronology is all wrong. Recall that the word maroon, along with others like cartoon, balloon and pantaloon, came into English at the end of the sixteenth century or later. This was after that particular sound change had taken place – ‘o’ had already shifted to ‘oo’. Sound change is a bit like an epidemic. It slowly works its way through the vocabulary of a language, but eventually peters out. Words that enter the language later won’t undergo that previous change – it’s too late.

According to people writing about pronunciation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, French words spelt ‘on’ were pronounced ‘oo’ at that time. So ‘meroon’ is an earlier pronunciation. But this doesn’t solve the puzzle: where do some English speakers get the pronunciation ‘merone’ from? If it were the outcome of some sort of odd spelling pronunciation you would expect the same people to say, instead of balloon and cartoon, ‘ballone’ and ‘cartone’. After all, these are spelt the same way. But there’s no hint of this pronunciation for these words. So spelling pronunciation seems an unlikely explanation. There is no neat solution to this puzzle. Like the origin of ‘she’, the plural dwarves and the disappearance of ‘firkytoodling’ from our vocabulary, the pronunciation ‘merone’ is just another of those many linguistic mysteries that help to keep linguists like me in business.

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