Mind your language | 14 November 2009

Two rather odd pronunciations to have gathered ground this year are of the words women and lieutenant. I think I heard Evan Davies say lootenant the other morning, though it might have been a stumble.

My husband does not like the pronunciation lootenant. He thinks it is an Americanism. It certainly is these days; the puzzle is how the f-sound got into it in the first place. The agreeable John Trevisa, a Gloucestershire vicar with connections with the Queen’s College, Oxford, mentions in his translation of Ranulf Higden’s history of the world that the Archbishop of Canterbury was lieutenant to the Pope, and the word is variously spelled in the manuscripts of his book leeftenaunt, lutenant or levetenaunt. That was in 1387, in the decade after the word is first recorded.

The speculation that people introduced the f-sound because they misread the u in lieutenant as a v is unfounded. The clever men at the OED think it possible that English people heard as an f or v the labial glide at the end of the French word lieu. I’ve tried it in front of the mirror and can’t quite hear it myself.

In any case, the f stuck, at least in Britain. Funnily, though, John Walker, the elocutionist friend of Garrick and Johnson’s, gives in his Pronouncing Dictionary (1791) the pronunciation levtenant or livtenant, he expresses the hope that ‘the regular sound, lewtenan*t’ will in time be adopted. His grounds are etymological, I suppose. Meanwhile, in America, Walker’s wish was coming true, so that by the end of the 19th century, the f-sound was said to be ‘almost confined to the retired list of the navy’. Today, the admirable Michael Quinion says in his online World Wide Words that the British Navy also employed a half-swallowed version, l’tenant, which he judges to have been mainly a lower-deck form and now largely obsolete.