SPELLING PRONUNCIATION

SPELLING PRONUNCIATION. PRONUNCIATION based on the SPELLING of a word rather than on conventional speech, such as often pronounced with /t/. In a language such as Spanish, the patterns of whose speech and spelling correlate closely, the concept is unnecessary, but in English, in which correlations between spoken and written forms are often weak, the term labels a common, though often unevenly developed, phenomenon: for example, a number of English words that begin with h, such as honour, honest, humble, human, were borrowed from French with no /h/ in their pronunciation. While some, such as honour and honest, continue to be pronounced without /h/, others, such as humble and human, are now pronounced with /h/ to fit their spelling (except in such entirely aitchless varieties as COCKNEY); in standard BrE pronunciation, the /h/ is pronounced in herb; in AnE, it is not. In some cases, spelling pronunciation triumphs over erstwhile common pronunciations: in general usage, waistcoat is no longer pronounced ‘weskit’. In others, when a word has been learnt only through reading, a spelling pronunciation may be used until the error is discovered: for example, that the ch of archipelago is pronounced /k/, not /tʃ/, and its closing syllables do not rhyme with sago. Spelling pronunciations can be invoked on an ad hoc basis, to contrast words that are otherwise homophones: for example, by saying ‘stayshun-AH-ry’ for stationary and ‘stayshun-ER-y’ for stationery.