December 17, 1999

colonel

I have been wondering about the origin of the military title colonel. Where did the word come from and why is it pronounced "KUR-nel" instead of "COH-loh-nel"?<

Colonel is a perfect illustration of how the spellings and pronunciations of some English words can come to diverge. The culprit, as is often the case, is the word's etymology. Oddly enough, English took this word from Middle French in two forms--coronel (borrowed around 1550) and colonel (borrowed in the early 1580s). Both of these French forms were derived from Italian colonnello 'little column', and were so named because such an officer traditionally led the first little column at the head of a regiment.

The spelling with r was the result of dissimilation, the process by which a speech sound tends to become different from, or at least less like, a neighboring sound. This process can be seen, for example, in the word purple, where the l was originally an r in the Old English word purpure. The influence of dissimilation can be heard currently in the common English pronunciation of February as "FEB-yoo-er-ee," in which the first "r" sound, difficult to say so close to the following one, becomes a "y."

The form coronel prevailed until the middle of the 17th century, when it disappeared in writing but not in speech. The written form with middle l, a closer reflection of the Italian, was increasingly favored in literary works, both in England and in France. Pronunciations for both English forms, however, ("kol-uh-NEL" or "KUL-nel" for one, and "kor-uh-NEL" or "KUR-nel" for the other) survived until the early 19th century, when the pronunciation "KUR-nel," from which the middle unstressed syllable had fallen away, came to predominate. This pronunciation, derived from coronel, is the one that has persisted, while the spelling colonel has become the written standard. Hence the confusion.

The lexicographer John Walker (1732-1807) is quoted in The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology (1966) as saying about colonel, "This word is among those gross irregularities which must be given up as incorrigible."

Enid