Separated by a Common Language

Now, if you worked at a college/university in the US, I am quite sure that you would hear alum much more than you'd hear singular alumni. I had a quick look in the Corpus of Contemporary American English, which showed twice as many an alum of as an alumni of (though the numbers were small--21 in total).

So, a few points of unseemly defensiveness after all this:

• Americans are able to and do use the Latin gendered suffixes. I mention this because there seems to be some belief that the British know Latin better than Americans do.  One of the interviewees in Jones's book on English expats in the US says she felt "she got to win a lot of arguments" because Americans assume “I [have] this great level of culture [and speak] and read fluent Latin” though of course she didn't. Similarly, I've had it said to me that Americans make barbarous "false" Latin words because we aren't close enough to the language. An British commentator on early American accents wrote that "Americans do not, however, speak or pronounce English according to our standard; [...] probably from a want of any intimate knowledge of Greek or Latin." I can't see much evidence for thinking the contemporary British folk have some access to Latin that contemporary Americans don't. Latin comes and goes in both American and British schools. Yes, the fancy public (i.e. private) schools of Britain do tend to offer Latin, but so did my run-of-the-mill American high school. Very few schools anywhere require it (or even offer it) any more--though apparently it's popular with American home-schoolers.
• If you see Latin plurals masquerading as singulars, it's not a case of "American political correctness" coming over and "ruining" the language. The British are very capable of being sensitive to gender discrimination and changing the language themselves.  

The other thing to notice is that Americans use these words more. In fact, Americans have a great head start on using them. This is not necessarily a bragging point. The reason Americans needed these words earlier is that American universities have long depended on their graduates' generosity.

That was not an issue for British universities, which until recently were funded mainly through government grants. While I've lived in the UK, I've seen tuition fees go from 0 to over £9000 per year. And it was only once the government stopped directly funding university teaching that universities needed to step up relations with their graduates in the hope of getting donations and bequests. That's when my university got an Alumni Relations Office, something any American university would have had decades earlier.

Americans, I would say, have a keener sense of alumnihood. They have stickers identifying their alma mater in the back windows of their cars. The phrase alma mater is about four times more common in AmE than BrE (in GloWBE). They go to homecoming. They follow their institution's sports teams for the rest of their lives. (The need to keep alumni involved is a big reason for American universities having so much sporty activity.) They might even know their college's/university's song. That's in general, of course. I can't say I do any of those things. But I know many more Americans than Britons who do. 

Typically, as we've discussed before, two-syllable words from French are stressed on their first syllable in BrE and on the second in AmE -- BALlet versus balLET, BAton versus baTON, etc. (Please see and comment on the linked post if that's the issue you're interested in.)

photo from: http://www.realseeds.co.uk/onions.html

This led me to wonder about shallot because it looks like a French borrowing (so many food words are), but the stress pattern is makes it look like it isn't:  BrE shalLOT versus AmE SHALlot or shalLOT. (You can hear them both in an American accent here.)  American dictionaries tend to list the second-syllable stress version first--apparently considering that as most "correct". But I've always said SHALlot and can't recall hearing an American say shalLOT. For example, here's video of an American editor at a cooking magazine saying it the way I say it. (American and British vowel qualities in the word differ in predictable ways: we are firmly divided by the 'lot' vowel--or vowels, taking into account the variety found. Here I'm just going to focus on the stress pattern.)

So why doesn't it follow the two-syllable French-borrowing pattern? Probably because it's not a two-syllable French word. The French eschalotte has lost its first vowel in its journey into contemporary English.

Eschalotte was borrowed into English with the e at the beginning (at least in writing), though it lost the one at the end. The OED has citations for eschalot(t) in English from 1707 into the 19th century. But was that first e ever pronounced? One of the OED's citations is from Johnson's dictionary:

1755   Johnson Dict. Eng. Lang.,   Eschalot. Pronounced shallot.

The citations for shal(l)ot go earlier than those for the more French-looking version--back to 1664, making it look even more like that first e has been ignored from the (AmE) get-go.

Nevertheless, English seems to have some kind of sense-memory that we shouldn't treat it like ballet or beret or other French two-syllable words, because it isn't one. Nevertheless I see it and my reptilian high-school brain wants me to say 'shalLO' because that -ot reminds me of things like escargot and Margot.

The OED gets a bit judg(e)mental about the spelling:

The spelling shallot, though inferior to shalot because it suggests a wrong pronunciation, is now the more common.

Now, if they want me to come down hard on the 'lot' (as I know they do), I don't really understand that comment. Perhaps they mean that people might say SHALL-ot because they see shall in it. Well, that is what Americans do, but I can't imagine that we'd pronounce it like the dictionaries (and the British) tell us to if it had only one 'l'. I see shalot and I want to say it like chalet with an o.

If you're an American who says shalLOT, let us know--and please tell us where you got it from (i.e. what part of the country you learn{ed/t} the word in, or whether you've been influenced by BrE).

Meanwhile, I'm taking comfort in the fact that eschalotte shares history with (mostly AmE) scallion, since when I want a shallot I usually have to take a few moments to remember that scallion isn't the word for it.

Looking through my long list of topic requests, I've found a duplicate--so that surely deserves to be treated first. Mrs Redboots recently emailed to say:

I was watching an on-line video, yesterday, of a chef preparing fish, and instead of saying he was filleting it (with a hard "t") as I should have done, he said he was "filay-ing" it, as though it were a French word. And later on, I saw it written as "filet", where I would have used "fillet". Which is the original - for me "filet" is the French term, and I hadn't realised it was also used in America.

And Laura, a New Yorker in Cambridge, wrote 10 months ago (sorry, Laura) with:

My British husband and I find endless entertainment emailing your blog entries to each other. What a great resource. I have searched past entries and cannot find anything pertaining to our longest running argument - on the pronunciation of "fillet." He says "filliT," and I would say "fillay" (like ballet, right?), although I refrain from doing so here for fear that butchers won't understand me. I thought British English would be the version more influenced by French...then again, I pronounce the er in foyer whereas he would say "foyay." What is going on with the influence of French in American and British English?

I'll have to preface this by saying that I can't possibly discuss all such differences in the pronunciation of words from French here--there are lots of them. And let's not get into the pronunciation of words from other languages just yet (I have posts-in-process on some of them). To start with Mrs R's question about which is original, well, in a sense, the question doesn't really work, since the word was borrowed at a time before spelling was standardi{s/z}ed in English. And it may not have been standardi{s/z}ed in French, either (do we have an expert out there?). Modern French spelling is based (according to what the internets tell me) on medi(a)eval pronunciation, which would mean that at the time it was first borrowed into English, the 't' would have been pronounced in the original French word.

Looking at the OED, we can see the word in English back to 1327--though that is in the sense of 'a ribbon used as a headband' . The first quotation for the 'cut of meat' meaning in English comes from around 1420, in the plural filetes (remember, though, that the word would have been borrowed earlier than this and used in speech and in writing that hasn't survived the centuries). The 1327 quote uses filet, but in all of its senses, the spellings vary for the first few centuries. In the 'cut of meat' uses, we also see Fylettes (c 1430), Phillets (1658), Filets (1725). From the 1741 quotation, fillets rules until the first American quotation in 1858 (filets). So, judging from the dates, it could be that it was imported to the Americas at a time when its spelling had not yet settled down and the influence of French settlers headed it toward(s) the more modern French spelling and pronunciation. According to the Dictionary of American Regional English, in Maine people working in the fisheries say fillit on the job (their citation is from 1975, so may not be true now), though in lay use, it's filet, as in the rest of the US. For the McDonald's Filet-o-Fish, there is some question about how it should be pronounced in the UK, but the official McDonald's answer is '“Filet-o-Fish” can be pronounced any way you wish. Most people say “Filay”.'

Similarly, Americans tend to pronounce valet as 'valay', while it is more common to pronounce the 't' in BrE. As I've mentioned before gillet/gilet show a similar spelling difference--but that difference isn't strictly on national lines--I see both gillet and gilet in England and rarely either in the US. It's usually pronounced in the French way, but then it was imported from French more recently--in the 19th century.

Across both dialects, it's a general rule that the longer the word has been in English, the more likely it is to be pronounced as it is spelled/spelt. So, claret (a wine name rarely heard in the US, where it would tend to be called Bordeaux), which has been in English since at least the middle ages, is pronounced with the 't', but Cabernet, which came to us in the 19th century, isn't. But still, there are a lot of differences. Let's divide them into types: consonant differences, vowel differences and stress differences--though where there are stress differences there are often also C and V differences. From here I'm going to do less history and more listing.

Among the consonant differences we have the already-discussed herb ('h' versus no 'h'). Then there's the French 'ch'. Chassis usually has a hard 'ch' in AmE, but usually a soft one ('sh') in BrE. (Both usually don't pronounce the final 's'.) According to the OED, preferences for the pronunciation of niche are reversed in BrE and AmE, with rhymes-with-itch dominating in AmE and rhymes-with-leash dominating in BrE. Myself, I've always pronounced it to rhyme with leash wherever I've been--but the pronunciation was only 'Frenchified' in English during the 20th century. So, nitch-sayers can consider themselves to be a certain kind of authentic, and niche-sayers can consider themselves to be another kind of authentic. And then there's schedule, which begins with a 'sh' in BrE, and a 'sk' in AmE--though one does hear the AmE pronunciation in BrE now (and BrE speakers often say timetable where AmE speakers would say schedule).

On the vowels, I've been mocked in England for my AmE pronunciation of France (rhymes with ants but without the 't'). Yes, the standard, southern BrE pronunciation is more like the French pronunciation, but it's also part of a more general pattern of AmE having the [ae] sound (as in cat) and standard, southern BrE having a long [a:] in these places--cf. dance, lance, chance and answer. And the southern BrE pronunciation of these things in these ways is due to a modern change in pronunciation (see this discussion of the TRAP-BATH split). So, I'm not convinced that BrE speakers say Frahnce (or Fraunce, if you prefer) because they are being authentic in a French way--they are being true to the rules of their own dialect.

A more irregular difference is in clique, which is 'cleek' in BrE, but often 'click' in AmE. See the Eggcorn database for some discussion of the consequences.

And leisure is more French-ish in BrE, where it rhymes with pleasure, than in AmE where the first syllable is usually pronounced 'lee'.

The 'a' in apricot is like that in cap in [my dialect of] AmE and in cape in BrE. I'm sure there are people in each dialect who would argue that theirs is closer to the French, but the fact that both dialects pronounce the final 't' (and that neither uses a 'b' rather than a 'p') tells us that it's given up any preten{c/s}e of being French.

As you can see, this list is pretty random and I'm sure there are others that could be added. Here's one that has both consonant and vowel differences: vase. The BrE pronunciation is more like the French with an 'ah' and a 'z', whereas the usual AmE pronunciation rhymes with place.

On to stress... Note that most of the following involve vowel changes as well, since unstressed vowels are reduced (which often includes making them more centrali{s/z}ed in the mouth).

AmE tends to keep the French stress pattern make recent loan words sound more 'foreign' by resisting the native urge to stress earlier in the word, whereas stress in BrE tends to gravitate to the front of the word. This means that ballet is BALay in BrE and balAY in AmE. The same pattern can be found in a number of two-syllable French borrowings.

ballet
baton
beret
bourgeois
café
debris
frontier (in this case, neither dialect preserves the French three-syllable pronunciation)
garage (with changes in the vowels and final consonant too, as mentioned here)
pastel

For three-syllable words, BrE often stresses the penultimate (second-to-last) syllable where AmE stresses the final one, with a secondary stress on the first syllable. Thus one stress pattern can seem as if it's turned inside-out if you're used to the other one. The sore-thumbiest one for me is Piaget:

escargot
fiancé(e)
Piaget (the Swiss psychologist): BrE pee-AH-ʒay vs. AmE PEE-uh-ʒAY

This is not to say that AmE always resists the urge to move the stress leftward or that BrE never does. Observe police, which has the accent on the last syllable in both standard dialects--though there is a non-standard (and sometimes jokingly used) first-syllable-stressing pronunciation in some dialects of AmE: PO-leese. Courgette in BrE retains the final stress.

And then there are the other examples that go the opposite way, with AmE having the stress more front-ward than BrE. This is typically for words that have been in the language longer and seem 'less French' to us than things like beret and escargot:

address (noun)
magazine
m(o)ustache(s)

And then there is Renaissance, for which I quote from the American Heritage Book of English Usage:

This 19th-century borrowing from French, which literally means “rebirth,” is usually stressed on the first and third syllables in American English. In British English the word is usually stressed on the second syllable, which is pronounced with a long a sound [...]. The American English pronunciation is an approximation to the French pronunciation, while the British English pronunciation reflects the typical English (Germanic) tendency to put the main stress on the root part of a word.

So, I'm sure you'll come up with many more examples and counter-examples, but that's a smattering, at least. Special thanks to Better Half, for letting me (AmE) sleep in/(BrE) have a lie-in a few times during the past couple of weeks, so that I could work/blog into the wee hours. Having written all this, I find I've not/I haven't commented on Laura's mention of foyer, but since I don't want to abuse BH's kindness by sleeping the whole of tomorrow away, I'll just refer you to this nice little discussion on 'The Growlery'. I've concentrated on pronunciation here, rather than French-versus-English spelling, which we'll go into another time. If you can't wait, see here and here and here for some discussions where French and spelling intersect.

If you're a regular reader, you'll know that I feel shame when I do a post that's mostly just listing "they say this, we say that". There are plenty of sites around that do that kind of straight word-for-word listing. But I get enough requests for vegetable names that I'm just going to try to get it over with right now. Where there are links, that's because I've already written about some of these at greater length elsewhere. I've also already written about veg/veggie and various herbs (and the pronunciation thereof). So please click on those links to discuss those issues in greater detail.

And now, the list (which has no particular order):

BrE	AmE
aubergine	eggplant
courgette	zucchini
rocket (sometimes roquette)	arugula
mange tout	snow peas/sugar peas
spring onion	green onion/scallion
swede	rutabaga
beetroot (treated as a mass noun)	beet (count noun)
sweetcorn	corn
chicory	Belgian endive
pepper (sweet pepper if it's not green; one occasionally hears the AusE capsicum)	(bell) pepper
chick-pea	chickpea/garbanzo bean
haricot bean	navy bean
broad bean	fava bean
runner bean	string bean
cos lettuce	romaine lettuce

In addition, some names for groups of vegetables are different. BrE pulses = AmE legumes (though, technically, legume is a broader category). In AmE I'd refer to cruciferous vegetables, meaning broccoli and cauliflower collectively, but in BrE I hear Brassica, the Latin name of the family (which includes cabbage and Brussels sprouts).

Squash are another matter. One easily finds acorn and butternut squash (and courgettes/zucchini) in both countries, but otherwise the varieties of squash tend to be different. Marrows will be known to fans of Wallace and Grommit, but the term is not much used in the US. It refers to "any of various kinds of squash or gourd which are chiefly the fruits of varieties of Cucurbita pepo, eaten as a vegetable; esp. one of the larger round or cylindrical kinds with green, white, or striped skins and greenish-white or (occas.) yellowish pulpy flesh" (OED June 2008 draft rev.), so courgettes/zucchinis are technically small marrows. In the UK I've never seen what we call summer squash* (aka yellow squash--is this a regional difference? Not sure) or spaghetti squash (which was something of a fad in the US in the 1970s, I think, but I haven't seen it lately). The OED lists pattypan (squash) as 'chiefly N. Amer.', but I've only seen it for sale in the UK and South Africa. Pumpkin is generally only used of the orange-rinded variety (for making jack o'lanterns) in AmE, but in BrE the term applies more generally to gourd-y squashes with orange flesh. (Jack-o-lantern pumpkins have become more available in the UK as Halloween celebrations have become more popular.)

The British talk about more kinds of shelled peas (garden peas, petits-pois [for younger, sweeter peas]) than Americans do. (Click on the link for the mushy variety.)

As can be seen in the examples presented here, BrE tends to be more influenced by French and AmE shows some Italian influence, which is not surprising since Britain has a lot of contact with France and its cuisine, and popular cuisine in the US has been greatly affected by Italian (and other) immigrants. Those who read Menu Italian may not recogni{s/z}e arugula for Italian rucola, but arugula was the dialectal version of the word that immigrated to America. (Just as rutabaga is not the general Swedish word for that kind of turnip, but a dialectal term for it. Click on the link above for more on that.)

I await the first comment that points out a completely obvious one that I've left off the list!

*Summer squash for me has two meanings. Either the general term that refers to any thin-skinned squash, or the specific one that refers to yellow squash that are picked at the same time as courgettes/zucchini.

When I lived in South Africa, I often claimed that the country's major industry was bureaucracy. As a foreigner, I had reason to feel this, since until I was granted permanent residence (not very permanent, it turned out), I had to stand for a few hours on a (BrE) queue/(AmE) line every three to six months in order to have my work permit renewed. There was one year in which I had three chest x-rays--first they lost one, and then they made me incorrect identity documents...twice. The first time, my ID book said I was born in South Africa, the second time it said I was born in Albania (see evidence right--first name covered with (BrE) toilet roll/(AmE) toilet paper in order to maintain a sense of mystery). It also said I was a South African citizen, which was never true. By the time all the corrections were processed, the second x-ray had 'expired', so I had to prove again that I was tuberculosis-free. So, if I ever come down with any cancers of the upper torso, we'll know which government to blame.

But it turns out that South Africans are mere amateurs at bureaucracy compared to Higher Education in England. My life is paperwork. Paperwork if I want to give students an extra week to write their essays. Evaluations to write up about my students' evaluations of my courses. Then evaluations of the external examiner's evaluations of my evaluation of my students. (Most American universities don't even have external examiners.) Evaluations of all the courses in the department, then evaluations of all of the degrees on which those courses are offered. My reading lists have to be written up in at least three different formats (one for the library, one for the bookshop, one for the students) before each course. And, just like in South Africa, there's always someone in some office to tell you that you've misinterpreted a question or you were supposed to fill out a CQ3 instead of a QC3, and therefore your proposal/evaluation/application won't be considered again until the next committee meeting.

But the most difficult part is that I have a big block against talking about this paperwork, because I just can't get my brain around the local terminology. My colleagues use the term pro forma for what I would call a form. This is a Latin prepositional phrase that means 'on account of form'. Using it as an adverb seems natural (It was done pro forma), as does using it as an adjective (a pro forma document). My colleagues use it as a noun, though, which I've never experienced outside the UK. The noun sense ('an official form for completion' [OED]) is not found in American dictionaries (well, at least not Merriam-Webster's or American Heritage), but is in Oxford's. It's spelt a variety of ways:

1945 Ann. Trop. Med. & Parasitol. XXXIX. 226 A senior member of the nursing staff..checked that the patient took the tablet and recorded each dose given and taken on a pro-forma. [OED]

1978 Jrnl. R. Soc. Med. LXXI. 413 Details of the illness were recorded on a proforma. [OED]

Use of a pro forma for head injuries in the accident and emergency department [Journal of Accident and Emergency Medicine, 1994]

The examples above make clear that use of this term is common in medical jargon, but I'm here to tell you that the term is alive and well in English Higher Education as well.

Now, form in this meaning is perfectly sayable in British English, so I'm not really sure what has motivated the use of pro forma as a noun. But we can note that form has another sense in BrE, relating to a division of students in a school, discussed back here.