Left Tenants and Kernels

Ever notice how British English and American English have little differences in terminology and pronunciation? The two dialects are mutually understandable (mostly), but every now and then, a word becomes completely different over enough time.

Once the American Revolution’s dust had settled, divided by an ocean, the dialects had a real chance to diverge and carve out a unique identity.

One of these changes I’m fascinated by is the word lieutenant. If you’re reading this and you’re American, your mind’s ear hears “loo tenant.” On the other hand, if you’re English, Irish, or Scottish, you probably hear “left tenant” or “leff-tenant.” What’s going on here?

It seems like the word liutenant made its way over to England from France circa the 14th century. This was right at the start of the great vowel shift, when the pronunciation of lots of English words began a steady shift that lasted centuries.

The French word breaks down into lieu (place) and tenant (holder). You know the phrase “in lieu of”? Same word, same meaning. Tenant is even more common in English today—a tenant is someone who holds their place of residence.

Still… shouldn’t it be “lew tenants” instead of “left tenants”? I should be clear up front that this is a mystery today, and nobody knows for sure why this is so… so I’ll be wearing my speculation hat today.

When the word “lieutenant” is written out, there’s that troublesome letter U right there… or was it a V? Without the standardization that came with the printing press a century later, people had their own handwriting styles. Those two letters in particular were often up for debate (or even interchangeable!) on the written page.

If you’ve ever studied Latin, one thing that might jump out at you immediately is the way the hard V sound that’s common in many English words is instead pronounced like the letter W. For instance, vir translates into “man”, but it’s pronounced wir, while salve (which means “hello”) is spoken as salwe.

If you sort of squint your ears a bit, you can hear that “lew tenant” might have a little bit of a hard sound in between the two root words, insisting that there should be a letter there to hold that little place. The letter pair V and W does this, and so does the pair of V and F.

It is conceivable that the English heard the word and saw it written, and interpreted these inputs as needing a harder sound. “Lew tenant” might have become “loove tenant”, which then became “loof tenant”, and so on.

There’s another thing going on, too. It’s called schismogenesis, and I’ve written about it here:

The basic idea is that two similar groups will tend to diverge far apart from one another, essentially in order to prove that they’re different. This is part of the reason why two family members can seem to hate one another far worse than two complete strangers, and it certainly happened with the English colonial possessions and England.

Even more so, it should come as no surprise that this happened even more so in military terms. After all, the American Revolution was all about carving out a unique identity that had as little to do with the British as possible.

Naturally, the Americans came to favor a pronunciation much closer to the original French word. This was half due to schismogenesis and carving out their own identity, and half due to the fact that French soldiers were in charge of training the young Continental Army.

Another sort of schismogenesis that coincided with the great vowel shift is the word colonel. Unlike lieutenant, we Americans don’t say this word differently from our British counterparts, but instead English made it a point to diverge from its French origins fairly quickly.

Similar to the way the Continental Army wanted to carve out a niche against the British, the identity of the British during the 16th century was largely “not French.” The French word coronel came from the Italian colonello. In English, the spelling changed from "coronel" to "colonel" in the early 17th century.

I can’t help but guess that this was mainly to differentiate the English word from its French origin.

If you’re American, what are some words that you notice that are spoken differently across the pond? If you’re British, what’s up with aluminum, schedule, and laboratory? If you live anywhere else in the world, what linguistic shifts like this have you noticed?