Etymology of Lieutenant

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Alex, phoning from Montreal.

Hi, Alex, welcome.

Well, the question I had, I serve as a master corporal in the Canadian Armed Forces, specifically in the Infantry Corps. And my question was related to the pronunciation of lieutenant.

Now, where I come from, it’s very, I guess by tradition, it’s a very Anglo unit. So a few members, including myself, refer to lieutenants as lieutenants, and that’s also very common in the British Army and the British Armed Forces in general.

So I was always wondering why it’s pronounced that way, especially in the more Commonwealth nations, compared to, let’s say, in the States, where the rank is referred to as lieutenant.

Yeah, that’s a really great question. So you’re in Canada, and you follow, at least for this particular word, the more traditional British pronunciation, lieutenant.

Yes. My unit specifically is a household unit. It’s a guards unit.

Okay. So by tradition, we’re quite English.

Yeah, and Canada overall is squeezed between two major influences, both the UK influence and the United States influence, right? And so it’s going to get pushed from both sides, and you can see this happening with things like whether or not the last letter is Z or Z.

Just to make one thing clear to everybody who’s listening, the word, regardless of its pronunciation, is still spelled the same, right? It’s L-I-E-U-T-E-N-A-N-T, right? Still spelled the same way.

Yeah, and that’s what’s especially confusing for folks. First, you’ve got to understand that both pronunciations come from French. Both of these pronunciations existed in French before the word was fully borrowed into English.

So it’s not something that the Americans came up with or invented on their own. There’s a little asterisk that I’ll explain in a minute.

And so this happened in French. There were a number of different words that had U’s in them, where the U wasn’t altogether clearly separated from the V. And the V and the F sounds can be very similar on the lips, right, whether or not they’re voiced or unvoiced and a couple other factors.

And so we have this kind of small group, this cluster of words that can be pronounced either with a F or V sound or without it. And this was one of those words. And nobody really knows why the French started doing that except there was a regional dialect where this apparently became more common.

Let it be known that it wasn’t some United States aberration that came up with lieutenant. Although Noah Webster, who had a tremendous influence on the pronunciation of many words in American English and United States English, did prefer the LIEU pronunciation, L-I-E-U to be pronounced, because he felt it hewed more closely to the etymological origins of the word. And he put that in his dictionaries as a preferred pronunciation.

Now, as a Canadian, I don’t know if you know, but there was a time in the United States where if you had books in your house, they went in this order of frequency: the Bible, Noah Webster’s Dictionary, and some Shakespeare. And so we’re just talking like the number two book for the longest time, like the second most common book that you were likely to read in American households was this dictionary. So it did have some influence on how Americans spell and how they speak.

Okay. I’m actually quite surprised that in French, lieutenant was even a thing. I always assumed that it was lieutenant.

Yeah, and it’s interesting. The French, over the centuries or even longer, have done a variety of things that have squashed out or drastically reduced the influence of their regional dialects. And even today, some of this takes place.

But there was a time when the diversity of the types of language spoken in what is today France were pretty much like they were when Italy became a nation, just like incredibly diverse, really interesting. A lot of Germanic influences or Dutch influences or just words hanging on from centuries before, just really interesting stuff.

And a lot of that has been extinguished or almost is now considered archaic or even just something to hang on to in order to have some pride, but it’s not actually a living language anymore, unfortunately. An attempt to bring everyone together under one sort of identity.

Yeah.

All right. Well, thank you so much for your call.

Thanks for taking me.

Yeah, sure. Keep up the great work, guys. Take care now. Good luck.

Thanks, Alex.

Bye.

Bye-bye.

You know, you mentioned the etymological origin, but we didn’t really talk about it.

Yeah, placeholder, right? Lu meaning place and tenet meaning holding or holder.

Exactly, yes. So you’re standing in for somebody. It’s equivalent to the Latin locum tenens, which people who are in medicine may know about the locum. He’s the guy that fills in with your, does your rounds for you or handles your patients while you are on vacation or you’re sick yourself.

Yeah, literally in place of you.

Yeah, lieutenant in lieu of you.

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