A Detail of Pronunciation and Spelling: My Struggle to Make Sense of..."Erm,..."

Seth Lindstromberg, UK

Seth Lindstromberg teaches at Hilderstone EFL College (Broadstairs, Kent, England) where he works mainly on language and methodology courses for non-native-speaking EFL and CLIL teachers and on EFL courses at all levels. E-mail: SethL@hilderstone.ac.uk

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Acknowledgement
The phenomenon
The brief, familiar story of r
An innovation in spelling
All this is not without its disadvantages
Should the UN put a stop to this?
Notes

Acknowledgement

This is just to say that my subtitle is in homage to Adrian Holliday's The Struggle to Teach English as an International Language, which made me chuckle as much as anything I've read since The Code of the Woosters¹.

Let's begin then with what I heard on UK radio some time last year. The disk jockey - he was English, probably from the South-East somewhere -was talking about the Swedish pop group Abba, which this chap was pronouncing /æbә/, /æ/ being the first vowel in fat. Then he said, "Why do Americans say 'Abba'? Do they think there's an 'r' in it?" And this time, for the first vowel, he used the vowel in the fa of father. So, what was he on about? Was he saying Americans pronounce Abba like Abbar, Rabba, Abbra, Arbba, Abrba, or what?

The phenomenon

In my younger days, when reading books written by real English people, I kept coming across Er and Erm, as in "Erm, excuse me...". Being a deeply provincial American Midwestern teen, I took the spelling at face value and supposed that my repertory of time-buying noises, Uh and Uhm, had been doubled. I confess that decades were to pass before I learned that my repertory had stayed just the same, except in spelling. And so, during all the years in-between, I must, when reading out British-English, now and then have pronounced the rs in Er and Erm just like I did every other r I came across. I didn't know that it was standard practice in England to put the letter r, instead h, after a vowel to show that the vowel is lax, long or somehow open.

This practice is understandable. First of all, why should the great majority of English people give two hoots about confusing people on the other side of an ocean? And then there is the fact that most English people articulate an r only (but even then not always) when it precedes a vowel. And when a spelled r comes directly after a vowel in the same word, that vowel does get pronounced in a more lax and/or stretched and/or lax fashion.

I wonder, though, what Scots, the Northern Irish, and people of the English West Country make of the use in writing of r to denote something that is miles away from any of the red-blooded rs that they utter. And here is where I show that bringing Adrian Holliday into this wasn't entirely frivolous, for this Erm business is, I submit, a case of linguistic imperialism that residents of the UK needn't traipse off to foreign parts to observe and shudder at.

The brief, familiar story of r

Some time after the Norman Conquest of 1066, when English once began again to be widely written, the evidence is that scribes and other writers tried in general to spell words as they themselves and/or others in their locality pronounced them. It is almost certainly relevant here that the sound-spelling conventions of Latin and of Norman French—which were influential on English orthography at that time-did not feature unpronounced rs. Thus, words like hard and water included r not just on paper but also in speech - throughout England.
It wasn't until the 17^th century that r dropping, or 'non-rhotic'², pronunciations of English are first mentioned (with reference to the London area, I believe). One source of information here is the diary of Samuel Pepys who criticized r dropping in no uncertain terms. That is, what he didn't like was this new way of pronouncing hard more or less like 'hahd' and water like 'watah'. Pepys's grumbles notwithstanding, during the following generations r dropping spread throughout the south-east of England, and eventually far beyond, even into Wales and to east-coast American cities such as New York and Savannah, and further yet, to the Antipodes. In the south-west of England, though, and very occasionally even in rural Kent in south-east England, one may to this very day encounter country people who speak in the old rhotic (full r way). As is well known, in Scotland, Ireland, Canada, and most of the USA rhotic pronunciation is the norm (even though not all these rs sound exactly the same).

An innovation in spelling

It used to be, sometimes at least, that when English speakers wanted to anglicize an utterly foreign word or lexicalize a previously non-lexical sound, they made use of the letter 'h' to indicate that a particular letter represented the open, lax 'a' of father rather than the short, tense 'a' in cat. This was considerate in that there was no potential in this practice for confusing anyone. One example of such a transliteration is the word mah-jong (i.e., a Chinese table game which had a burst of popularity in the West a few generations ago). North-Americans have stuck to this unambiguous way of indicating an open 'a', as you can see by looking at a selection of foreign language phrase books published for the North American market. For instance, the pronunciation of the German word Vater ('father') is likely to be rendered by fahter. But within the last few generations, non-rhotic English people took to using r for this purpose almost exclusively so that if mah-jong were to be newly transliterated in England now, its spelling would be mar-jong. You can see this use of r in...

• learn-a-foreign-language phrase books published in Britain (the kind you kind buy at an airport)
• in demotic spellings such lurve (e.g., "She's in lurve!" = in love).

All this is not without its disadvantages

One interesting result of r dropping is new possibilities for homophony. Thus, in most varieties of the English of England, homophonic (= same-sounding) pairs like Bali & barley, law & lore, laud & lord, Sean (i.e., 'Shawn') and shorn are just the tip of a small but potentially troublesome iceberg of homophones. And use of r in writing to indicate laxness, length or openness, can only be adding to the potential in all this for confusion. For example, on British TV a while back there was a spelling competition among five English celebrities. (The contest was modeled on what has long been known in North America as a 'spelling bee'.) The total number of words spelled didn't far exceed 100 and yet there were three r-related mistakes owing to the fact that the woman who called out the words spoke a variety of British English in which r is 'dropped' from words like hard and better. So, two contestants wrongly imagined an r to exist in a word they didn't know. A presenter of a children's TV show mispelled peccadillo as 'peckerdillo' while the comedienne Jo Brand, otherwise a brilliant speller, gave mascapone as 'mascarpone'. Thirdly, the late Richard Whitely (a graduate of Christ Church College Cambridge, no less), who himself hosted a word-game show, mispelled orthography as authography, plainly having been misled by the word-reader's rless pronunciation. The really interesting thing about these mistakes is that the contestants who them also spoke the same general kind of r-dropping English as the word-caller. Now, if even they were misled by dropped- r pronunciation, the chances are that an r-keeper like me - or a someone from the Celtic fringe of Britain - would've been misled even more often. .

Should the UN put a stop to this?

I have tried to make the case that the use of 'r' that we see in Erm and lurve, is potentially confusing. Certainly it is a provincialism. Should we go so far as to say it is inconsiderate? Well, I'm not suggesting anyone need be concerned for Americans on that score, after all they voted twice for Bush and on that account deserve worse. But what about the Scots, for instance? It's not like they are never to be seen or heard in England. Many of the most popular voices in the news media are Scottish. The current government is clogged with Scots and, as I write, the very rhotic Scot Gordon Brown looks set to become the next prime minister. Doesn't that make it the tiniest bit remarkable that spellings like lurve can have worked their way into national currency? No wonder the Scottish National Party has gone from strength to strength.

I have heard it wisely said that an ideal compromise between cricket and baseball would be a game virtually identical to baseball. In a similar vein, use of ah (rather than ar) to indicate laxness, length or openness in a vowel would confuse no one. Ditto the use of Uhm for Erm. Put differently, an American or Canadian foreign language phrase book would make far more sense to English readers than vice versa.

But we know the answer already. The written use of r in Erm, lurve, and so on hasn't been determined by any academy or ministry that I can phone up and complain to. It' a product of the grass roots and is not likely to go away any time soon. Still, I appeal to all r-droppers in TESOL to bear it in mind that even within the UK strongly rhotic varieties of English still flourish. And, since I have given examples of how the practice of dropping and adding r can result in confusion (e.g., about spelling) even among r-droppers, the potential for confusion must be much greater for learners whose mother tongues are strongly rhotic - Russian, Spanish, Italian, Southern German dialects, and Arabic, for example. At the very least, why not set aside a couple of minutes of class time in which to warn your students about the sad reality that the spelling of Uhm as Erm makes no sense in several varieties of English?

Notes

¹ See the entry for P.G. Wodehouse, Wikipedia.
² The terms rhotic and non-rhotic were coined from rho, the name of the Greek letter for the r sound.

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