Colonel Pronunciation

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Good morning. This is Marita calling from La Mesa, California.

Hi, Marita. How are you doing this morning?

Hi, Marita.

Hi. I’m doing really well.

What can we help you with?

Well, you know what? I am an eighth grade teacher, and my students and I are reading the novel Johnny Tremaine. And they asked why we pronounce the word kernel as if it had an R in it. And calling you was a lot more fun than looking it up in Google.

Are you sure?

You got that right.

Because, you know, there are cat videos on Google.

Did you see those?

No.

All right.

Well, yes.

What is the question?

Yes.

So why do we pronounce colonel, which is spelled C-O-L-O-N-E-L, with an R sound?

Great question.

We get that question a lot. And let me see if I can try to explain it.

Marita, picture an army marching in formation.

Okay, they’re all in one long column, right?

Oh, okay.

Okay.

Now, in Italy, the word for that military column was colonna. And the officer who’s in charge of that column of soldiers, the commander there, is the colonnello. Okay, he’s the commander of the colonna.

Oh, okay.

Are you with me so far?

Now, the word for this officer at the head of a column of soldiers moved into French, and there it began to sound more like coronel rather than colonelo. And you can have your students do this, maybe. Have them pronounce colonel really fast or colonelo really fast ten times. If you do that colonel, colonel, colonel, colonel, it’s the R kind of intrudes in there sometimes.

That would be a good exercise for your eighth graders.

Have them practice that.

And so originally it came into English as coronel from French with that R sound. And it was spelled a lot of different ways, but C-O-R-O-N-E-L was a standard spelling and a standard pronunciation.

But what happened in the 16th century is that a lot of people in England were doing translations of Italian military manuals. And they saw the more etymologically correct term colonelo. And so they changed it in writing anyway to C-O-L-O-N-E-L.

So those two terms existed side by side, coronel, and then the word with the L, but they were pronounced the same way.

Yeah, this kind of confusion of the R and the L happens again and again in a variety of languages, not only in French and English, but in Italian as well, and it’s called dissimilation.

It’s because out of all the sounds that our mouths can make in English, the L and the R sounds are actually really difficult. And so we tend to either leave them out or substitute the L and the R for each other.

It happens to a wide variety of speakers in a wide variety of languages.

Yeah, like the word pilgrim comes from the Latin peregrinus, and it’s that L-R thing again.

Very interesting.

Well, I’ll have a great time sharing this with my students.

Excellent.

Yeah, if you want a little more information about it, just Google linguistic dissimilation, and you’ll probably come up with some very good resources.

Yeah, or just have them say colonelo 10 times really fast.

That works, too.

That sounds more fun.

Thanks, Morita.

Thank you.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

Martha, I did not know that you were a military expert.

I’m not. I play one on the radio, but I am most certainly not.

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