analogous

I listen to a lot of podcasts, and I notice things. One thing I’ve noticed is that no one seems to be able to agree with anyone else without saying 100%. That cliché seems to have caught on in both UK and US, so that’s not the topic of this blog post. This blog post is about another thing I’ve noticed: an apparent change in the British pronunciation of analogous.

 

Dictionaries give the pronunciation as /əˈnaləɡəs/ (or similar; all dictionary pronunciations here from the OED). That is to say, the stress is on the second syllable and the ‘g’ is pronounced ‘hard’ as in analog(ue). What I’ve been noticing in BrE speakers is a non-dictionary pronunciation, /əˈnaləʤəs/, which is to say with a ‘soft g’ as in analogy.

 

To see how common this pronunciation is, I looked to YouGlish, which finds a word in YouTube videos (using the automatic transcription), classifies them by country, and presents them so that you can listen to that word pronounced by lots of people in lots of contexts. The automati{s/z}ation means that it makes mistakes. I wanted to listen to the first ten pronunciations in US and UK, but had to listen to 12 in the ‘UK’ category to get ten that were both British and the right word.

screenshot from examplesof.net 

 

The first British one had a pronunciation that I hadn’t heard before: /əˈnaləɡjuÉ™s/, as if the spelling were analoguous. Half (five) of the British ten had the hard ‘g’ pronunciation, four had the soft-g pronunciation I’d been hearing, as if the spelling is analogious (or analogeous). All of the first 10 US ones said /əˈnaləɡəs/.

 

The word analogous seems to be more common in AmE. There are 2433 examples of it on US YouGlish, versus 147 examples tagged-as-UK. (The US population is about five times larger than UK’s, and Americans might post videos to YouTube at a higher rate than Britons. So while that’s a very big numerical difference, it doesn’t mean Americans say it16 times more than the British.) That’s in speech. In writing, there’s about twice as much American analogous in the News on the Web corpus:

 



 

So, Americans have presumably heard the word more than Britons have, leading to a more uniform pronunciation.

 

Now, when people know a word more from reading it than from hearing it, we might expect that they will rely on the spelling to know how it sounds. What’s a bit odd here is that the non-dictionary pronunciations contradict the spelling. Perhaps some people who know the word from print have not fully noticed that the spelling is -gous and think it’s -gious. Or perhaps they’re deriving the word anew from their knowledge of other members of that word-family.

 

            Analog(ue) = /ˈanÉ™l*É¡/  +  -ous = analogous /əˈnaləɡəs/  [dictionary]

            (* different vowels: AmE [É”] or [É‘] & BrE [É’])

 

            Analogy = /əˈn*lÉ™dÊ’i/   +  -ous  =  analogious >  /əˈnaləʤəs/ [non-dictionary]

            (* different vowels: AmE [æ] & BrE [a])

 

            Analogu(e) + /ˈanÉ™l*É¡/ + ous  =  analoguous  > /əˈnaləɡjuÉ™s/ [non-dictionary]

 

 

In the last case, the ‘u’ that is silent in analogue is treated as if it’s ‘really there’ and pronounced in the extended form. This sometimes happens with ‘silent’ final consonants and suffixes. Think of how the ‘silent n’ in damn and autumn are pronounced in damnation and autumnal. This is a bit different, since it’s a vowel, and I can’t think of another example where a silent final ue does the same thing. We don’t go from critique to critiqual (it’s critical) and tonguelet is not pronounced tun-gu-let or tung-u-let: the u remains silent.

 

When I tweeted (or skeeted or something) about the soft-g analogous pronunciation, some respondents supposed that the -gous ending is not found in other words, and therefore unfamiliar. (One said they could only think of humongous, which seems like a jokey word). It is true that analogous is the most common -gous word, but the OED lists 153 others, most of them fairly technical terms like homologous, tautologous, homozygous, and polyphagous. There are fewer -gious words (83), but they’re much more common words: religious, prestigious, contagious, etc. The relative frequency of -gious endings versus -gous endings may have contagiously spread to analogous.

 

But there’s something to notice about contagious and its -gious kin and analogous and its -gous mates. The main stress in a word like contagious is in the syllable just before the -gious, i.e. the penultimate syllable (/kÉ™nˈteɪdÊ’É™s/, religious = /rᵻˈlɪdÊ’É™s/, prestigious = BrE /prɛˈstɪdÊ’É™s/ and AmE /prɛˈstidÊ’É™s/ ). (English stress patterns are often best described by counting syllables from the back of the word.) The main stress in analogous is not on the penultimate syllable, but on the one before (the antepenult). That is, we say aNAlogous not anaLOgous, no matter how we pronounce the ‘g’. If soft-g analogous was surmised from (mis)reading rather than hearing the word, and if it was following the model of words like contagious, we’d expect it to be pronounced anaLOdÊ’ous, with some sort of O sound as a stressed vowel. That's not what's happening.


(One way to think of this is that there’s a general pattern that long -ous­ words are stressed on the antepenultimate syllable, but only if we think of the ‘i’ in -gious words as a syllable of its own, which gets elided after the stress pattern has been set. There’s way more to explain about that than I can do in a blog post…and I am relying on decades-old phonology education here.)

 

Now, I am not a phonologist or a morphologist, so I asked my former colleague and friend Max Wheeler to check my reasoning here. He's OK'd it and adds:

To make your argument another way, while -gous is unusual, '-jous' after an unstressed vowel is unparalleled.
[...] analogy is quite a common word, while analogous is much rarer (and people may not readily connect semantically to analog(ue)). Even people with a literary education are unfamiliar with the /g/ - /j/ alternation, so 'mispronounce' fungi, pedagogy, as well as analogous, taking no guidance from the spelling. The phoneme from the more frequent word-form wins.


The moral of the story: soft-g analogous is a bit weird—which is to say, a bit interesting.

 


 

If you liked this post, you might like:

-og and -ogue

-ousness

conflab




 

30 comments

  1. Replies
    1. Even people with a literary education are unfamiliar with the /g/ - /j/ alternation

      This is literally something taught to beginning readers if you're using anything even remotely approaching phonics, so....

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    2. David Marjanović31 August, 2024 15:31

      Tens of millions of people were not taught anything like that. Instead, they were taught to recognize words like Chinese characters. This is one result of that.

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    3. Replying to Anonymous's reply: By alternation I meant morphological alternation, between allomorphs where /g/ alternates with /ʤ/. Do beginning readers come across fungi, pedagogy, analogous these days?

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    4. Ah, Max, I gotcha. I thought you meant the very simple rule where (typically) the letters c and g before the vowels e, i, and y represent the "soft" sounds and otherwise not.

      I've heard some wild things about what is and is not possible to sound out in English by people who apparently don't understand the concept of phonics at all, so I guess I jumped the gun a bit.

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  2. This was a fascinating read, thank you! I was amused at the unexpected confirmation of how, er, idiomatic my idiolect is - analogous (hard g) and tautologous both appear regularly therein . :)

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  3. 66 year old brought up in SE England. I definitely use the əˈnaləʤəs pronunciation and I don't remember ever noticing anybody use the other pronunciation. The only one from your list of similar words that I think I've ever had occasion to say aloud is tautologous and again I use the -əʤəs pronunciation.

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    Replies
    1. Same here

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    2. Yep. And I don't consider analogous a particularly unusual word. More frequent, certainly, than homologous (which I pronounce with a hard g) and tautologous (soft) - both of which I read sometimes although say rarely.

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  4. Having read your UK "I've heard all of these" options, I honestly didn't know which one I used, they all sounded OK to me. But, by academic training I'm a biologist. Although genetics was not my field, homozygous and heterozygous were definitely a pretty common part of my written and spoken lexicon for a number of years, and they're both with the hard g all the time. I think analogous with the hard g would be my default, just because I'm so used to that sound at the end of other words that I use(d) far more often.

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  5. How many of the UK examples were from Simon Whistler though?

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    1. The number of times I've wished YouGlish had a 'remove Simon Whistler' option...

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  6. Always the hard 'g' for me. Don't think I've heard other pronunciations.

    Incidentally, on the matter of pronunciations, I was intrigued to hear a newsreader on BBC Radio 3 last week referring to the stricken yacht, the Bayesian, and pronouncing it b-YES-ian. The name is derived from the Bayes theorem, formulated by the British clergyman and mathematician, Thomas Bayes, and is pronounced bay-zian.

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    1. I pronounce it /ˈbeɪʒən/, and apparently I'm not alone, as this pronunciation is listed alongside yours in Wiktionary.

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  7. You mentioned "tautologous" as an example of another "-gous" word. I'm a Brit and have only ever, as far as I'm aware, heard it pronounced with a soft rather than a hard "g". Interestingly, YouGlish gives two examples, one from a UK and one from a US speaker, and both have a soft "g": https://youglish.com/pronounce/tautologous/english

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  8. I (BrE, elderly, Southern) realise I have absolutely no idea how I pronounce it - both sound wrong when I say them! But I agree, "tautologous" has, in my dialect, a soft "g". I think "analogous" probably does, but I woudln't swear to it. It's one of those words I read rather than use!

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  9. I was rather surprised by your writing 'automati{s/z}ation'. Both I (UK) and my wife (US) would use 'automation', although I see that automatize or -ise do appear in Collins' dictionary.

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  10. I (BrE, elderly, Midlands) would definitely pronounce 'analogous' with a hard 'g'.

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  11. The pronunciation /əˈnælədʒəs/ has been in John Wells's Longman Pronunciation Dictionary ever since its first edition (1990, p. 25), which suggests that this is not a new trend but a variant that was already being used--in Britain at least--in the second half of the 1980s.

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    1. Did Wells mark it as nonstandard? No other dictionary has entered it, as far as I can tell; Wells was probably more observant and more willing to enter variants than anyone else.

      In his blog (23 January 2007), Wells mentioned analogous and three similar cases: meningococcal with a soft g by influence from meningitis; digoxin by influence from digitalis; and purgative, which he heard once on the radio with a soft g as in purge.

      (Actually, digoxin with soft g is the standard pronunciation, since it's an abbreviation of "digitalis toxin".)

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  12. The interesting question, to me, is how the technical term pharyngeal ended up not only pronounced that way but spelled accordingly. There's no etymological e or i in it*, and the French and German form is pharyngal as expected.

    * The plural of pharynx is pharynges, but that... never occurs, does it?

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    Replies
    1. David Marjanović31 August, 2024 15:43

      argh, didn't mean to be anonymous

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    2. Larynx - laryngeal goes the same, at least. What is the adjective derived from phalanx?

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    3. phalangeal - meaning of or derived from the fingers - phalanx for the military formation is a metaphor

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    4. Insertion of the e may be a spelling designed to soften the g in these words?

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  13. As to your initial point about people saying "100" when they agree, a more frequent issue I have is with (American) retail providers saying "perfect" at some point, no matter what I have done. Ordered the filet of sole? Perfect! Gave $5 for a $4.19 purchase? Perfect! I am trying to resist pointing out that $5 is not in fact exact change and so is clearly not "perfect." Thank you for listening.

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  14. Totally off topic, but waitstaff saying "perfect" lots of times as an acknowledgement of what the customer is saying has also become common in Southern England. I try very hard not to be irritated by it, but don't always succeed!

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  15. And in case anyone cares, I'm another British person who has no preference between a hard or soft 'g' in 'analogous'. Unhelpfully, either sounds fine to me.

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  16. lynneguist: "The relative frequency of -gious endings versus -gous endings may have contagiously spread to analogous."

    That seems to be what happened to margarine, which originally had a hard g (and still does in French); it was probably influenced by the name Margery (itself an alteration of Margaret by the same process) and words like margin and merge, says a Quora answer by linguist Nick Nicholas.

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Abbr.

AmE = American English
BrE = British English
OED = Oxford English Dictionary (online)