My paternal grandmother’s maiden name was Winkle. Don’t laugh - this is a relatively common name in the Potteries, and presumably originates in the place name Wincle, which is a village in Cheshire. The Oxford Names Companion gives two possible etymologies of the place name: “Hill of a man called *Wineca”, or “Hill by a bend”. OE personal name + hyll, or wince + hyll.

When I started researching this part of my family history, I spent a cold afternoon in a church vestry copying out all the relevant birth marriage and death entries in the Registers, and noted that some of the entries had the spelling “Wintle”. I was interested, but not surprised, because a feature of the Potteries dialect is the merging of the consonant clusters /tl/ and /kl/ as /tl/. (It is common, for instance, to hear people talking about “pittled onions”.) I assumed, therefore, that the vicar, not being a native of the Potteries, was hearing “Wintle” and spelling the name accordingly, despite the regular local spelling being “Winkle”. I continued to collect references to the Winkle families of the district for some years, including all the entries in the censuses from 1841 to 1881. I noticed, however, that ‘my’ family appeared not to be listed before 1881, even though my great grandfather was already 45 at that time. The light began to dawn with the discovery in the 1881 census that my great grandfather was born in the Forest of Dean. Down in Gloucestershire, the name that is common is Wintle, and I now found that he had moved to the Potteries some time after 1851, when he was 15. He married, as Wintle, in 1859. He and his growing family are all listed in the censuses of 1861 and 1871 as Wintle.

My assumption about the dialectal confusion had been correct, but the wrong way round: by the time of my grandmother’s birth in 1877, the registrar had heard my great grandfather say “Wintle”, but had assumed that this was his dialectal way of saying “Winkle”, and registered my grandmother under that spelling. The whole family became “Winkle” by 1881, and when my great grandparents died, within two weeks of each other in 1924 - after 65 years of marriage, made even more remarkable by the fact that my great grandfather had been a coalminer - they were both buried as “Winkle”.

So even in an age when literacy was spreading very fast, the spelling of family names could still be affected by local dialectal considerations.

Definitions of adjectival “only” from recent dictionaries:

“alone of its or their kind; single or solitary” (Compact Oxford English Dictionary for Students)

“used to say that there is one person, thing or group in a particular situation and no others” (Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English)

“single in number; without others of the kind; without others worth considering” (The Chambers Dictionary)

What all these definitions stress is the singularity of only, whether referring to one item or a singular group. If something is already singular, you cannot then have “one of” it.

Neal gives the sentence The 100 people in this organization are the only ones who know. This is covered by the Longman definition quoted above (”one group in a particular situation and no others”) .

Maxwell suggests we replace only by solitary in Waitrose’s statement, but for me that doesn’t make any more sense. He also says that if we remove the word only, the sentence is perfect. Of course it is: it is the juxtaposition of only and one of the that I cannot accept. Make it “Waitrose is one of only five IPs …” and I have no problem, or even “… one of only a few …”, “… one of the few …”.

In Waitrose’s statement, internet providers is qualified by only, but what does only mean in this position? If it means ‘few’, then they should have written ‘few’. If it means what the dictionaries all seem to say it means, then it is being misused.

Maxwell also suggests that I may be denying the existence of idiom. Of course not, but idiom also needs to be fitted to the style or register of the language being used. In a fairly formal style like the one that Waitrose is employing, care needs to be taken that the target audience will not be able to find fault with it. Inappropriate use of language often leads to a dismissive response by the readers or listeners.

Plus is defined in the dictionaries quoted above as an “informal” conjunction, but all the examples given show it as the first word of a sentence, not preceded by a comma.

“We offer a fast, reliable, honestly priced connection, plus we’re one of the only internet providers in the UK to donate all our profits to charity.”

This is the claim of Waitrose.com.

It’s amazing how anyone can really think that “one of” and “only” can come together in the same sentence. A moment’s thought must bring the realization that “one of” anything must be one chosen from a group which contains others, whereas “only” means quite clearly “the one and only”. So is Waitrose the only internet provider in the UK to donate all profits to charity, or is it one of the (?)few, (?)many IPs so to do?

The fact that “one of the only” is a common phrase, found everywhere, does not make it acceptable English. It is understandable in the spoken language, where we change our mind half way through many if not most of the sentences we utter, but in supposedly thoughtful written language, it should be amended to something more meaningful.

The punctuation of Waitrose’s statement is also less than perfect: there should be at least a semi-colon, if not a full stop, before the word “plus”.

The Spelling Society is to hold its centenary conference at Coventry University, and ahead of this, an article in Tuesday’s Guardian quotes the Society’s Secretary, Dr John Gledhill, as saying “In other languages, like Italian and Spanish, if you learn the alphabet, you know how to spell”.

No one can doubt that learning to spell in either Italian or Spanish is easier than mastering the same task in English, but it isn’t as straightforward as Dr Gledhill claims. Take Spanish. Like English, it uses the same letter to represent more than one sound, and more than one letter for the same sound. There are also ’silent’ letters.

C is either a voiceless velar plosive /k/ or a voiceless dental fricative /Ɵ/ (or alveolar fricative, depending on the variety of Spanish being spoken). It depends on the following letter (plosive before consonant or a, o, u; fricative before e, i), e.g. cocina (’kitchen’) /ko’Ɵina/. The velar plosive is also written as QU (before e or i), querer (’to like, love’) /ke’rer/; and the dental/alveolar fricative is written Z before consonant or a, o, u: razón (’reason’) /rra’Ɵon/, bizcocho (’biscuit’) /biƟ’kotʃo/ . That seems clear-cut, but a very few words may be written with Z even before e or i, mostly scientific or borrowed, admittedly, but including zipizape (’row’, ‘rumpus’). There seems no reason for this not to be spelt with initial C other than the symmetry of the two halves of the word.

G is either a voiced velar plosive (or more often its voiced fricative allophone), before consonants or a, o, u; or a voiceless velar fricative /x/ before e or i. But, J is always a voiceless velar fricative, and occurs in some words before e or i: jefe (’chief’, ‘boss’) /’xefe/, and jinete (’horseman) /xi’nete/, to mention two reasonably common words.

H is always silent, except in the spelling -CH- which represents, as in English, a palato-alveolar affricate. So echo (’I throw’) and hecho (’done’) have identical pronunciations.

B and V are always interchangeable - they both represent a voiced bilabial plosive or its more frequent allophone a voiced bilabial fricative [β]

There are also problems with what is written as LL. Depending on the variety of Spanish, this can be a lateral, an approximant, a fricative or an affricate or even a plosive. In all cases apart from the lateral, it can coalesce with what is usually considered to be a semi-vowel: /j/, written either I or Y. Consequently it is not uncommon to see words misspelt here as well.

“Greengrocers’ spellings” are found in Spanish-speaking countries just as we have “greengrocers’ apostrophes” in the UK.

In the late 1980s and 1990s, Oxford University Press published three books of names: The Oxford Dictionary of Surnames (Patrick Hanks and Flavia Hodges, 1988); A Dictionary of First Names (Hanks and Hodges, 1990); and A Dictionary of English Place-Names (A.D.Mills, 1998). Then in 2002, OUP decided to reissue all three volumes under a single cover as The Oxford Names Companion. I am naturally disappointed that they did not include a fourth title: The BBC Pronouncing Dictionary of British Names (G.E.Pointon, 1983), as this would have nicely complemented all three.

Unfortunately, they did not take this opportunity of updating the volumes to make them consistent.

I don’t think I’m unusual in this: when I got my copy of the Companion, I looked up my own name. It’s there, in both the Surnames and the Place-Names sections, but the entries do not correspond.

Surname:

Pointon English: habitation name from a place in Lincs., so called from OE Pohhingtūn ’settlement (OE tūn) associated with Pohha‘, a byname apparently meaning ‘Bag’ (cf. POKE). Var.: Poynton

Place-Name:

Pointon Lincs. Pochinton 1086 (DB). ‘Estate associated with a man called Pohha’. OE pers. name + -ing- + -tūn.

Poynton Ches. Povinton 1249. ‘Estate associated with a man called *Pofa’.  OE pers. name + -ing- + -tūn.

Poynton Green Shrops. Peventone 1086 (DB). ‘Estate associated with a man called *Pēofa’. OE pers. name + -ing- + -tūn.

(DB = Domesday Book; * before a name means it is not attested)

So we have three places from which the Pointons/Poyntons may take their name, not one. How can we decide which is the most likely in any particular case? University College London and the National Trust have come to our aid.

There is now a website, http://www.nationaltrustnames.org.uk/, which tracks the distribution of family names in Great Britain in 1881 and 1998.

This gives the absolute frequency of a name, and also its relative frequency (occurrences per million of the population) and ranking (where its frequency stands in relation to all other family names). There is also a map which shows the areas where the name appears most frequently. In both 1881 and 1998 there were heavy concentrations for both spellings in Staffordshire and Cheshire. Allowing for some of the south Staffordshire families having moved there from Shropshire, it seems clear that the Companion has got it wrong in stating categorically that Pointon originates in Lincolnshire - the least likely origin of the three possible ones for the vast majority of Pointons, who live in north Staffordshire and south Cheshire. Hanks and Hodges seem to have been beguiled by the spelling, which is clearly arbitrary, and to have ignored the evidence in their own research for the alternative (Poynton).

I don’t often disagree with John Wells, but I have to make an exception in the case of his blog entry for yesterday (St George’s Day 2008 - 23 April). He says:

“In the respelling systems I designed first for the Reader’s Digest Great Illustrated Dictionary (1984) and then later for the Encarta World English Dictionary (1999), with their spin-offs (pictured), I introduced the idea of making use of doubled consonant letters.”

No, he didn’t introduce this idea - the BBC has been using double consonant letters in its respelling system since the first edition of Broadcast English I: Recommendations to Announcers Regarding Certain Words of Doubtful Pronunciation (1928). The system in use by the BBC now is rather more sophisticated than that, which was devised by Arthur Lloyd James, but the principle remains the same. Here are a few examples from that first publication, with the traditional orthography in brackets:

áddults (adults), bárraazh (barrage), bássolt (basalt), bíttewmen (bitumen), éppilogg (epilogue), répplikka (replica), wésslĭan (wesleyan).

John must have been at least subconsciously aware of the BBC system - which he was presumably already familiar with from the BBC Pronouncing Dictionary of British Names, which uses what the BBC calls its Modified Spelling alongside an IPA transcription - when he started work for the Reader’s Digest.

Where I do agree with John is his initial statement that most users of dictionaries fail to read the introductory material, material that is just as important as the alphabetical entries when it comes to interpreting the editors’ intentions.

Traditionally, since the days of Arthur Lloyd James and Kenneth Lee Pike, languages have been divided into two broad types: syllable-timed and stress-timed. French was considered the archetypal syllable-timed language (Lloyd James called this ‘machine gun rhythm’), in which each syllable had a similar duration, and English, probably the language whose rhythm has been studied most intensively, and mostly by native English speakers, the archetypal stress-timed language, in which stresses occur at approximately equal intervals of time. Doubt has been cast on this classification, because the measurements taken by phoneticians using ever more sophisticated machines have shown that neither syllables nor stresses are truly isochronous.

Phoneticians need to consider the case of music, which is, like language, a form of “organised sound”, and which also consists of variation in pitch, timing and intensity. Drum machines create mathematically exact rhythms, which humans cannot do. Human performers, on the other hand, produce interpretations of musical works which are not mathematically precise, but are still, nevertheless, rhythmical. Bach is considered to be one of the most scientific of composers, but electronic renderings of his music, while rhythmically precise, are lifeless. Performances by a human interpreter, however, can move the listener deeply. Composers using ‘Sibelius’, or one of the other suites of music software, find that they have difficulty using a (piano) keyboard to play in the rhythm that they want to be recorded, because the software recognises the minute differences of duration between the notes, and transcribes what it “hears”, leading to tiny fractions of beats being notated when they are not intended.

It is perhaps no accident that many phoneticians through the years have also been proficient musicians. As phoneticians, we need to learn more about the way in which we hear musical rhythm, and apply that knowledge to how we hear language. It has often been reported that interlocutors take up each other’s rhythms in a conversation. How can they do this if there is no rhythm to take up? Measuring durations of sounds in milliseconds will not work: rubato, accelerandi and rallentandi cannot be accounted for in such terms. Instead, a more impressionistic approach is needed, that will allow for the nuances of expression that are conveyed by rhythmical variation.

It may well be that there are more than the two types of linguistic rhythm, or that there is a gradient from extreme syllable timing to extreme stress timing, but I believe that it is our ears, not our machines, that will decide this in the long run.

Angshu, in a comment on my ‘Afghanistan’ post, has been critical of my reasoning for recommending the English pronunciation of Afghanistan even to Mishal Husain, who uses a variant that may or may not be an Afghan (whether Dari or Pushtu) pronunciation.

Angshu appears to be saying that a bilingual French and English speaker should pronounce the capital of France in the French way when speaking English. Presumably I, in the same way, should continue to pronounce London in the English fashion when I am speaking French (even though I am not bilingual), and ignore the fact that French has a perfectly good version - Londres. Most English speakers know that Germany is called Deutschland in German. Are newsreaders to say “In Deutschland this afternoon …”? That way madness lies.
When Mishal Husain is speaking Punjabi, or Urdu, or whatever her other language is as a bilingual speaker, then I would expect her to call England by whatever it happens to be in that language, and not “England”. Likewise, when she is speaking English, it is mere pretension to affect a Punjabi/Urdu pronunciation for a South Asian place name, when there is a well-established English version.

The debate over the pronunciation of Pres. Sarkozy’s name rumbles on. John Wells today seems to be advocating middle syllable stress as the obvious one for English speakers, but he is ignoring the predecents of Mitterrand and Pompidou. He suggests that only an out-of-touch pedant would advise the Hungarian stress, but neither Mitterrand nor Pompidou had this justification for initial stress, and yet they tripped off the English tongue just fine, while MitTERRand and PomPIdou would have sounded bizarre. Names from other languages often have final syllable stress transferred to the initial syllable in English: Khrushchëv and Gorbachëv are two Russian names that immediately spring to mind.

John’s comments are prompted by Marcel Berlins’ column in yesterday’s Guardian. Mr Berlins has, as they say, ‘previous’, in complaining about the BBC Pronunciation Unit: about ten years ago, he wrote a piece in which he claimed that a member of the Unit had told him he was mispronouncing his own name. I wrote him a polite letter saying that it was most unlikely that any member of the Unit should have suggested such a thing, as policy was always to recommend the version preferred by the bearer of the name. In fact, no member of the Unit recalled having even spoken to Mr Berlins, let alone having discussed the pronunciation of his name with him. Instead of writing back to me, Mr Berlins returned to the topic in his column, and (one assumes jocularly) threatened legal action for doubting his word. As a good BBC employee, I let the matter drop at that time, but it is clear that he enjoys attacking those who cannot answer back in kind. I find it difficult to believe that any current member of the Unit could write a “snide, sniffy and defensive letter”, as he says.

Rather than just assert this to be the case through his column, he should publish the offending words, and let us see for ourselves just how unpleasant the current members of the Unit are, so that we may all know how to treat them in future. Perhaps Mr Berlins should take the trouble to visit the Unit, and meet the three highly qualified, and very personable, linguists, and develop a personal relationship with them rather than making “snide” and “sniffy” comments about them from afar.

Athel Cornish-Bowden in Marseille asks about the final -s in some French place names, and French versions of non-French place names (e.g. Douvres, Londres, Cornouailles).

The final -s in these names is often the final remnant of the Old French masculine nominative singular case, which in turn is the left over of Latin final -us in masculine names. Old French retained two of the Latin six cases: the nominative, and the accusative (called in Old French the oblique). Masculine nouns seem to be perverse in this form, in that the nominative singular ends in -s, while the plural does not, and the oblique singular has a zero ending, while the plural ends in -s. As the two case system “decayed” into the no case system we have today (except for the pronoun declensions), the nominative was the form of most nouns that disappeared. Not always, however, and those names that retain the final -s are the last survivors of the Latin case: Charles, Georges, Gilles are three boys’ given names that retain -s - and note that in two of these cases so does modern English (Charles and Giles). Many place names also retain this final -s, and in English we have kept more, it seems, than the French themselves. Marseilles (English) or Marseille (modern French) is just that. Until at least the Second World War, Marseilles was pronounced /mɑːr’seɪlz/ in English, and the final -s (or /z/ sound) was dropped when we English started to realise that the French don’t say it that way - just like the change in Lyon.

Athel makes one very common slip in his lists of names: while Algiers is spelt with final -s in English, Tangier is not. In French, neither name has a final -s.