Separated by a Common Language

May I make a couple of comments. I have rarely come across anyone in the UK who pronounces oesophagus with a short "e" as in "west", but always as in "east".
I'd also note how much the ae digraph varies in pronunciation:
in "maelstrom", as "malestrom"
in "maestro" as "my-stro"
in "archaeology" as "arch-ee-ology"
ans with the same long "e" in anaesthetise, but a short one in anaesthetic.
I'm curious to know whether these different pronunciations have anything to do with how the spelling changes (or doesn't) in AmE, with which I am less conversant.

To Doug -- in AmE, anesthetize and anesthetic have the same e vowel sounds, although the emphasis is on the 2nd syllable in anesthetize and on the 3rd in anesthetic. I've never heard anyone use a long e in either word.

I also prounounce maelstrom and maestro with 3 syllables. The second is barely heard, but it's there.

You haven't met Better Half, then, who pronounces oesophagus with a short 'e' or short 'i'. OED lists both pronunciation as BrE. I'll go back and soften the claim about that one.

AmE has a short 'e' in both anesthetize and anesthetic, but a long one in anesthesia.

I don't think that there's an absolute, direct relation between the spellings and the pronunciations, since there's not a lot of regularity about them in either population. But there could be an effect. For instance, why do AmE speakers pronounce the 'e' in estrogen with a short vowel, but the 'e' in enology (BrE oenology with a long one? It looks like they're just following general English spelling-pronunciation associations: long 'e' when followed by a single consonant, short 'e' when followed by a double consonant or consonant cluster. Esophagus follows a different pattern because the 'e' there is in a non-stressed syllable.

But I think that there's a limit to how much of the pronunciation can be blamed on the spelling, since we tend to learn pronunciations from hearing words spoken, rather than from reading them.

I wasn't trying to claim that the 'ae' is pronounced the same in the various examples given--just that not all 'ae's are missing in AmE. They all have in common that they're standing for front vowels/diphthongs (ones that are pronounced by making the tongue higher in the front of the mouth).

Oops, I said something wrong in the last comment--but too lazy to try to right it in there. The long 'e' in anesthesia is not the one that is written 'ae' in BrE, but the second one, which is irrelevant to this discussion. So, ignore that. The 'e' in AmE anesth- is always short.

Oh, and just noticed something else about (o)esophagus. The entry that I was looking at was the draft entry from 2004, in which a short-voweled first syllable is listed first for BrE, in which the first syllable rhymes with kiss. After that, it lists the long-voweled variant.

But if you look at the previous entry--i.e. the one in the second print edition--it only lists the long 'e' pronunciation (and offers no AmE pronunciation either). Of course, this doesn't mean that a change has just taken place since 1989, but it probably does indicate that the tide is turning for (o)esophagus.

Some more words with ae/oe in American:
aegis, paeon, phaeton, subpoena, phoenix, coelacanth.

Perhaps the only word with ae in AmE but not BrE is aerie (eagle's nest: British eyrie).

My only candidate for a name with ae in Britain an e in America is Judaea.

There are plenty of words where British English has simplified the digraph: the following are all obsolete spellings: aera, aether, Aetna, anapaest, chamaeleon, fraenulum, hyaena, maeander, paederast, paeony, anacaea, perinaeum, praesidium, primaeval, paramoecium, oeconomy, oecumenical

Biologists retain the Latin names; thus a chimaera is a type of fish, while a chimera is a Greek monster.

Words not from Greek (or Greek-influenced Latin and French) are red herrings:
Norse aegir aesir maelstrom oersted; Anglo-Saxon Aelfric Caedmon woe toe throe shoe roe does;
Gaelic Aengus Gaelic;
German baedeker eisenstaedt haeckel jaeger laemmergeyer maeterlinck rensselaer saengerfest schroeder roentgen goethe froebel foehn boehmite;
Scots blaeberry;
French caen;
Welsh caerphilly;
Korean chaebol;
Hebrew Ishmael Israel Michael Nathanael Preraphaelite;
Italian maestro;
Spanish paella faena;
Dutch groenendael;
Hawaiian pahoehoe;
Portuguese capoeira;
Miscellaneous baez pekoe loess hoopoe floe felloe chloe arapahoe;
Non-diphthong aedes poet noel dostoevsky arsinoe (aerial aerosol historically come from this category)

I think your rules (as opposed to lexical exceptions) can be boiled down to these:

1) Change ae, oe to e in Greco-Latin and Latin words only, never in those from other languages.

2) Do not change final ae.

3) Initial oe is far more likely to be changed than initial ae.

On the lexical exceptions, I note that the adjective esthetic is very common (Google can't be trusted on this, due to stemming and remapping effects), probably more so than the noun esthetics relatively to the corresponding ae forms. The form cesarean section, with neither capital nor diphthong, is also now very common in technical AE -- its connection with the Caesar family is doubtful at best, anyway.

But as mollymooly's impressive list of exceptions indicates, it's certainly not all Greek/Latin ae/oe that reduce to 'e'.

I'm tempted to say that legal jargon (e.g. subpoena, aegrotat--which isn't really legalese, but it's 'academic legalese'--i.e. it's part of degree-giving rules at universities) is more likely to keep the digraph than medical jargon is (e.g. h(a)emoglobin) in the US...but that's just an impression. Too late in the evening to try to back it up!

BrE also has the short e in anaesthesia. It's only in the verb it seems to be lengthened. Thanks for an interesting post and the comments. I do enjoy your blog.

I have noticed a transatlantic pronunciation difference in an(a)esthetic which has nothing to do with the ae. I had a friend from New York when I was living in Munich, and she pronounced it "anestetic" and "anestetize", in other words with a t sound rather than th as in "thing." Is this common? Is it just New York? Was it just her? My Texan wife doesn't do it.

Definitely not a general AmE feature, Cameron, but likely to be a feature of some idiolects and possibly dialects. It's a bit of a tongue-twister to put 'th' and 's' together, which is why a lot of people also say 'twelfs' instead of 'twelfths'.

The champion for THAT, I think, is asthma. It is almost always pronounced either athsma or just plain azzma. That must be a spelling change in its early stages. Like the "respi(ra)tory" and "vet(er)inary" I hear a lot on KSHN. And possibly "lib(ra)ry", wihch I don't. Libry, I think, is more common here, while respitory and vetinary appear to be more AmE.

I don't think arch(a)eology consistently loses its second "a" in AmE - I remember in elementary school when it was on my spelling list, using "archaic" as a memory device to put that second "a" in!

When considering ae, oe, and ue in various forms of English, you need to watch out for transliterated forms of umlauted vowels: Zweibruecken, when Zweibrücken is too difficult.

I suspect this is a factor in borrowings from languages that use the umlaut.

In case anyone cares, anacaea should read panacaea in my previous post.

ans with the same long "e" in anaesthetise, but a short one in anaesthetic.

All to do with the stress. Most unstressed vowels in BrE are reduced to a schwa or an i.

mollymooly, I never want to play Scrabble against you.

Speaking of (A)Etna, there's a huge insurance company in the U.S. called Aetna. According to its website, the name was "inspired" by the volcano, Mt. Etna. "Awed by the strength of the mountain, [the founders] named their fledgling venture Aetna Insurance Company" in 1850.

Thanks for the Ant&Dec warning. I probably would have caught it anyway, but now I'm sure to!

Speaking as someone who orders rather a lot of library books, I certainly haven't noticed 'fetus' being preferred over 'foetus' in British titles

Isn't "anyhoo" dismissive, as in a third person joins a conversation, late, spouts all sorts of non-rlevent fac-pinion. when they pause, one of the original parties to the conversation remarks "anyhoo" and returns to the real topic.
Also useful if someone has just put their foot in their mouth in front of others. "anyhoo" from one of the audience will break the embarsing silence and the discussion can continue.

I don't think anyhoo is any more/less dismissive than anyhow--it's just a matter of context. When you're using either, it's usually to change the topic of conversation, so you can see that as 'dismissing' the last topic, if you like--but it's not necessarily a bad thing.

Lynne,

Damn...didn't know about Ant & Dec in time to watch last Saturday. That's what I get for staying constantly behind in my blog reading...

Janet

Lynne,

Strike that last note -- I can't even get my mental calendar straight! We'll be tuning in THIS COMING Saturday!

Janet

The word which I see increasingly being used with its American spelling in the UK in this category is medi(a)eval. Someone even tried to correct my usage of the British spelling with the 'a' in place - though I soon put them right!

foetus is also a latin form, at least in Renaissance period latin:

http://publicdomainreview.org/collections/plates-from-spiegels-de-formato-foetu-liber-singularis-1626/

The author is flemish.

"Edward M Carney in A survey of English spelling estimates that the BrE ae is e in AmE in 89% of words and 63% of names. (I was a bit puzzled that the name claim was so high, as I have a hard time thinking of names that are spelt differently in the two dialects. The only one I can come up with is Rachel, which I'd never seen spelt Rachael until I moved to the UK--but now I notice that an American cooking celebrity has that name.)"

I would not have been puzzled, for two reasons: The first is the practice, with familiar names, of valuing unique, inventive, and/or 'traditional' spellings. (This has strong historical roots among African-Americans, being an extension of the slave practice which allowed some hope of later contact should a child be sold "down the river". This practice has also gained traction among whites, for various reasons, in recent decades.) The second is the stubborn persistence of archaic pronunciations among Yankee and Scots-Irish families, almost into the present day. (As late as the seventies, I encountered several native speakers, through the Carolina border area SE of Asheville, whose speech was quite archaic, even Elizabethan.)

Lynneguist, in the case of enology, that's almost certainly more a matter of affectation. Consider the role of wine in middle class American social settings; it's treated as a class differentiator. Were I unkind, I might say that snobbery is their motivation. (Apologies to those who enjoy words for their own sake, as well as those whose genuine erudition is offended by the deliberate attempts of self-appointed 'reformers' of the language whose richness they know well enough to appreciate.)

My favorite pair of pronunciations in this vein is caesarean/Caesarean. I recall old British movies, at least two of them, in which someone presumedly erudite pronounced Caesarean as chezz' a ree un. Is this/was this a class thing, a boffin thing, or what? In any case, it tickles me even more than pronouncing Caesar as Kaiser.

scp1957

someone presumedly erudite pronounced Caesarean as chezz' a ree un. Is this/was this a class thing, a boffin thing, or what?

I don't think it could possibly be a matter of class or specialisation. The only source for such a pronunciation is the Italian Giulio Cesare. Since the speaker was a fictional character, not an Italian speaking English, I can only conclude that it was meant as a joke.

I have to imagine two characters who find the American spelling cesarean amusingly ignorant. Most likely, these characters are (in my imagination) well-to-do professionals with holiday homes in the part of Tuscany often called Chiantishire because of all the Brits of that type holidaying there. Even without that detail, there's a habit — in comic fiction, if not in real life — for snobbish people to assume Italian speech habits.

I wouldn't be surprised if the screenwriter intended the audience not to share the character's joke — to laugh not with him but at him.

It is my feeling that reducing æ and œ to and e sound is an oversimplification that misrepresents and distorts the true pronunciation of the words containing those combinations.
Surely the e was added to moderate or modulate the pronunciation of the other vowels rather than replace them?
I wonder how Phoenicia escaped this.

Hairy Scot

The spellings AE and OE were regularised in Classical Latin to represent 'diphthong' sound which started with one vowel quality (a-like or o-like) and shifted to something approaching a Y-sound. Greek had similar sounds but spelled them with an I rather than an E. So Αισχυλος (Aiskhulos) and Οιδιπους (Oidipus) became Aeschylus and Oedipus in Latin.

The two sounds were something like the English diphthongs in PRICE and CHOICE.

However, the pronunciation of Latin changed, so that AE sounded the same as short E and OE the same as long E. This was when Latin was still a language which people learned at birth and spoke all the time.

Then the Roman Empire disintegrated and what people learned at birth and spoke all the time was one or another dialect of Latin. These dialects became French, Italian, Spanish etc. Those knew learnt 'proper' Latin learned it as adults and read it far more often than they spoke it. So they read AE- and OE-spellings as E-spellings — with the pronunciation of E-sound which was used in the region where they lived.

Nobody made different sounds for AE, OE and E for more than a thousand years. Late in the nineteenth century, scholars worked out what the pronunciation had been in Classical Latin. But in all that time, scholars preserved the spelling of Classical Latin by watching closely for mistakes in the copying of manuscripts, and by reading the unchangeable spellings carved in stone.