← The History of English Podcast
The History of English Podcast
Bonus Episode 4: Let Me ‘Buoy’ Your Spirits
How do you pronounce ‘buoy’? In this bonus episode, we explore the history of the word and the reasons why the word is pronounced differently in various parts of the English-speaking world.
Loading summary
Transcript1 lines
- [00:01]
Kevin Stroud
Hi, everyone. Welcome to this bonus episode of the History of English podcast. This is bonus episode number four, Let Me Buoy youy Spirits. Or perhaps I should say, let me buoy your spirits. In fact, that's really the main subject of this bonus episode, the pronunciation of the word B u o y in modern English. Now, a couple of episodes back in episode 31, I concluded the episode by discussing some words that passed from the Franks into modern English. And one of the words I mentioned was that word B u o y, which I pronounced buoy. And that is the most common pronunciation of the word in the United States. However, that pronunciation elicited a great deal of discussion in the comments section of the episode on the website. In Britain, the pronunciation is boy, and it's my understanding that that's also the pronunciation in Australia. And it also appears that Canada tends to use boy as well. But Bowie also makes an appearance in certain areas, perhaps due to US Influence. Now, as I noted, the pronunciation in the US Is generally buoy, but in some parts of the country, boy is also used. And in fact, the British pronunciation of boy has made its way into American English in some very specific ways. The soap brand Lifebuoy originated in England and came to the US with its original pronunciation. Even in the US it was called life buoy, even though it was spelled B u o y and clearly referred to the maritime object, not a small child. Now, I was fascinated that this one word generated so much discussion. After all, there are lots of words which are pronounced differently on each side of the Atlantic. But I was also intrigued by the fact that the difference in pronunciation really involved two different diphthongs, oi and ooey. And last time I mentioned that a diphthong is a linguistic term that refers to two different vowel sounds which have been pushed together into a single syllable. So you might remember that the Anglian word ye was the West Saxon word ye, and the Anglian word jar was the Old Saxon word jar. And I noted that the Old Saxon dialect had a lot of these diphthongs, where the Anglian dialects to the north tended to have fewer of them. And the reason why we still spell both of those words with that ea in the middle is because it reflects that diphthong which the West Saxons used. Well, in these examples, it may have seemed like a very subtle distinction, but when we're talking about words which are a part of your language and which you use every day, those differences can be very noticeable. So the differences between boy and Bowie may not seem all that big linguistically but when you're accustomed to one pronunciation and then you hear the other, it can be very striking. So, while we may not think the differences between the West Saxon dialect and the Anglian dialects were all that great, the people of 7th century Britain probably thought the differences were quite significant. Now, in that episode, I mentioned that the Thames was a general dividing line between the West Saxon and the Anglian dialects, and that was in large part because the river provided a general dividing line between the Angles and the Saxons when they settled in Britain. And Lewis Hynwood has been kind enough to prepare a couple of maps which illustrate these political and linguistic regions, so you can check them out@historyofenglishpodcast.com Now, I wanted to make one quick correction to the last episode, and that correction will become apparent if you look at the maps. While the River Thames did provide a general dividing line between the Angles and the Saxons, one group of Saxons did settle on the north side of the river, and those were the people called the East Saxons. And that region came to be called Essex. So Essex is on the north side of the river, even though most of the Saxon regions were on the south side. So, again, we have to use the river as a very general dividing line. Now, even though Essex was on the north side of the river, it was heavily influenced by the Anglian dialects around it. So even though Essex was a Saxon region based upon the early settlements, it actually spoke an Anglian dialect. And the same was true for the region of Middlesex just to the west of Essex, and the early city of London, which was located on the northern bank of the river, it was also part of Essex. And that's why early Londoners spoke an Anglian dialect, even though, again, it was technically part of a Saxon kingdom. And since modern English ultimately derived from English dialects spoken in and around London, that's why some aspects of modern spoken English derive from these early Anglian dialects, even though the standard written version of Old English was in the West Saxon dialect. So I hope you can follow that and all that makes sense. The bottom line is that both the Anglian and the West Saxon dialects feature prominently in the development of the English language. And ultimately, the differences between the dialects weren't all that great. But again, to the people of Anglo Saxon Britain, it probably seemed like a much greater distinction than it does to us today. And that brings us back to some of the differences between the modern dialects of English, which may not seem all that great to people who are learning English for the first time, but can seem very significant to native speakers. So in the English of Britain and the Commonwealth, the last letter of the Alphabet is Z, but Americans call it Z. In part of the English speaking world, the sport played with the black and white ball is called football, but in other places it's called soccer. And in some places, English speakers pronounce B, u, o, y as boy, and in other places it's bowie. But in all of those examples, Z and Z, football and soccer and buoy and buey, that all involved situations where multiple versions of the words once existed. But over time, some speakers picked one version or one pronunciation, and other speakers picked the other version. So, for example, the last letter of the Alphabet came into English from French with two different pronunciations. There was a long version, zeta, and a short version, se. The letter, together with both versions of the name, passed into Middle English after the Norman conquest in 1066. In the middle Ages, the letter developed many different pronunciations, which included zede, si, zad, and izzard. But zed eventually emerged as the official name of the letter in Britain. When the British settled in America, both Zed and Z were in common use. Z was more common in the north, and zed was actually more common in the South. But Noah Webster was from Connecticut in the Northeast, and his 1828 English Dictionary became the standard dictionary of American English. And since he was from New England, he asserted that the proper pronunciation of the letter's name was Z. So that eventually became the standard American pronunciation. The same kind of thing happened with soccer and football. The formal rules of the sport were codified in England in the 1800s, and it was called association football. The term soccer began in England as a shortened version of the word association. Both football and soccer were once in common use, but over time, the terms have become separated by region. And with respect to boy and bui, we have the same type of thing. The word was originally a common West Germanic word, and based on reconstructions, the original West Germanic version of the word was something like wolkna. As the West Germanic dialects became distinct, that word passed into Old English, and Old English retained a lot of that original pronunciation, including that consonant sound in the back of the throat at the end of the word. Baochna became beachen, and that word later evolved into the modern English word beacon, so that C in beacon represents a K sound that was there in the original form of the word. But the West Germanic Franks had their own version of the word. And as I noted back in episode 31, the modern Dutch language is largely descended from the language of the original Frankish tribes. And the Franks also contributed a lot of words to early French as well. So we actually have an early French version of the word and an early Dutch version of the word. And modern language historians still argue over which version came into modern English. English borrowed this Frankish version of the word around the 13th century. Now, this was shortly after the Norman Conquest, at a time when a lot of French words were pouring into English. So many scholars believe that the word came into English via the French version. But England is located directly across the channel from northern France and the Netherlands. So there was a lot of maritime contact between English speakers and Dutch speakers. And since this particular word, buoy or buoy is a maritime word, it's very possible that the Dutch version was the version which was barred into English during this period. In either case, both versions of the word were still quite similar at the time. Now, I don't speak modern Dutch, much less Middle Dutch of this early period, but it appears that the Middle Dutch converted that K sound at the end of the word into more of a Y sound, so that the word was something like buya. So it appears to be a two syllable word with a Y sound in between. And I should note that many modern European languages still pronounce that word with a Y sound at the end. So here's the modern German version, and here's the modern Danish version. And a borrowed version of the same word also appears in Czech and Polish. Here's the Czech version, boje. And here's the word in Polish, boja. Now, you can hear that Y sound at the end on all of those versions. And as I said, it appears that Middle Dutch also used that sound, but at some point it disappeared. And modern Dutch actually uses a pronunciation which is closer to the American pronunciation. Here's the modern Dutch version, bui. So what likely happened here is that the final syllable, the J part, was dropped at the end, and when that happened, the last vowel was the I sound. But what about French? Well, the early French had borrowed the word from the Franks as something like bui as well. Over the centuries, the pronunciation has continued to evolve within French. So here's the modern French version. So the final syllable has become more emphasized with an a sound in modern French. So that leaves us with English. And it's difficult to determine what the pronunciation was in Middle English. In fact, it's very likely that there was no single pronunciation in that period. Not only were regional accents very distinct in that period, much as they still are today, but a lot of words had been borrowed into English since they weren't native English words, the pronunciations probably varied quite a bit. And here we have a word that could have come from Old French or Middle Dutch, and it's very possible that it came from both. Both versions could have been circulating around Britain at the time. The upper classes who knew and often spoke French, they would have been more likely to use a French pronunciation. But sailors who worked along the coast may have been more likely to encounter the Dutch pronunciation through trade and maritime activities. So they may have used a slightly different Dutch pronunciation. And as we've already seen, this word was adopted throughout Europe. So there may have been different versions of the word floating around from the very beginning. In 1791, John Walker published a book called the Critical Pronouncing Dictionary in London. This dictionary became the de facto guide of English pronunciation within Britain for many years. In fact, his pronunciation guidelines are known as Walker's Principles of English Pronunciation. Now, Walker outlined the proper pronunciation of each consonant and vowel sound in English at that time. For the diphthong uoy, Walker included only one entry. He wrote, this diphthong is only found in the word B U, o y, pronounced as if written bwoy, but too often exactly like boy. But this ought to be avoided by correct speakers. So according to Walker, boy was a common pronunciation at the time, but it was not correct, according to him. He says that it should be pronounced as if it was written B woy, so the U had a w sound. Now, this statement is subject to differing pronunciations, and it's a little difficult to discern exactly how Walker thought the word should be pronounced. Was the opening consonant bwa or boa? Was the vowel sound supposed to be oi or ui or something else? We don't know. But whatever it was, it wasn't buoy. So that means that there were multiple pronunciations in England at the time. In 1810, a couple of decades after John Walker's book, another British scholar named Benjamin Humphrey Smart published a book called A Practical Grammar of English Pronunciation. It was published in London and it specifically confirms what Walker had written about 20 years earlier. He says that B U, O Y should be pronounced with a b w sound at the beginning and should never be pronounced as boy. Now, given that most people in Britain today say boy, we know that that supposedly correct pronunciation died out and the supposedly incorrect pronunciation won out over time. But what about in the US? Well, it appears that multiple pronunciations passed to the US as well. In the 1820s, a national spelling book designed for school children was published in New England. It used John Walker's pronunciation rules from a few decades earlier in London. It also specifically said that the word should be pronounced as if spelled bwoy. But around the same time, in fact, six years earlier, an American grammarian named Gould Brown wrote a text called First Lines of English Grammar. Now, he also cites this word as an example, but interestingly, he says that the ouy in the word is a triphthong, what he calls a proper triphthong. So you may be saying, what's that? Well, if a diphthong is two vowel sounds which are put together into a single syllable, a triphthong is three vowel sounds put together, and each vowel sound is pronounced in the syllable. So u, o, y, are each pronounced as vowels, specifically o, e. So that gives us something like bowie, which is very close to the modern American pronunciation of buoy. The important thing about this triphthong, though, is that it means that the u is pronounced as a vowel u and not as a consonant w sound, as Walker and that American schoolbook had suggested. So it appears that this triphthong, identified by Gould Brown, eventually became the more standard pronunciation in American English. And as often happens, it became shortened over time, and it simply became a diphthong buoy. But the important point here is that neither the British boy nor the American buoy was considered the correct pronunciation early on. But over time, these pronunciations evolved, and they replaced the original version that was considered the proper version in the 17th century. And I make this point because we find that a lot in English. There's a tendency to assume that one version of English is correct or the proper version. But very often the differences which exist today represent variations which developed at a later date. In some cases, both were considered proper at one time, and one region picked one version and the other region picked another version. And in other cases, like Bowie and boy, there was an even earlier version which was actually considered the proper version at the time. And the later versions, which we have today represent improper or incorrect variations of the supposedly correct original version. So I hope you found all of that interesting. Next time, I'm going to continue the story of English, and specifically, I'm going to explore the events which led to the first written text in the English language. So until then, thanks for listening to the History of English podcast.