I assume you mean that you say "hommidge" and "garridge"? I do vaguely remember Hildebrand from an anthology of horse stories I read as a girl. Kate Bunting Isaac Watts wrote these eight verses to paraphrase very loosely Psalm I goggled for these words because I misremembered the last verse Let every creature rise, and bring Peculiar honors to our King, Angels descend with songs again, And earth repeat the loud I thought it was peculiar homage , but no. I remember the line albeit imperfectly because from it I learned the 'particular' meaning of peculiar.
This actually served me badly when my uncle administered an IQ test to me. One question was What does peculiar mean? Knowing how tests work, this probably resulted in a lower vocabulary score than I actually merited. That said, I still find the collocation pay homage to familiar and not at all unusual. And each repeat the loud The missing word is, of course, Amen. Certainly things like humane and humility are different.
I can't pronounce the initial H even if I wanted to. Does anyone really say something other than "yumane" and "yumility"? As for homage, I seem to have free variation with both pronouncing the initial h and using the French g, independent of each other and of meaning except that I always use "an" as the indefinite article before it, and drop the H when the article is used, and the phrase "pay homage" where I always seem to use the "payommidge" pronunciation yh is just as impossible for me as hy.
Lynne I can only assume this has caused him some sort of allergy to the Oxford English Dictionary and that this caused him not to research the claims he made here about herb Actually, there's a defence. Clearly it should show separate UK and US pronunciations, but it completely fails to do so. The stuff you quote is hidden to the casual viewer. You need to click Show more at the end of the curtailed information headed by Etymology:.
It lists dialect forms herb, yarn, yirb. Also, it's great that you use humor! Boris Zakharin wrote: Does anyone really say something other than "yumane" and "yumility"? I say to approximate your system of phonetic pronunciation "hyumane" and "hyumility". How do you pronounce "hue"? The way I pronounce it is the way I pronounce the first syllable of each of the Previous two. Boris Zakharin Does anyone really say something other than "yumane" and "yumility"?
Almost everybody, it would appear. The OED recognises only Brit. I've always dropped the H in homage -- 'ommidge. I recognise the French pronunciation in an artistic context, but it feels so pretentious in my mouth that I'd try hard to avoid it! But I always write "an hospital", "an hotel", which is probably a holdover from being terribly pretentious as a teenager.
Dru: 'd regard 'homage' as a normal word, used in both the ways mentioned above. In my mouth and hence, presumably in my environment when I grew up. I say "hommidge" for the "respect" sense and "ommazh" for the work of art sense. In my kind of AmE the word "hommage" still feels very French.
All this talk about "hommage" puts me in mind of what Eeyore said about "bonhommie": "French word, meaning 'bonhommie'".
This was a wonderfully informative read! As an American living in Germany, I've encountered many new "Britishisms. Your use of aitch wasn't the problem. Who pronounces the P in "no"? Early English dropped some [h-] sounds and some letters before a vowel at the at the beginning of words. For native vocab, it was unstressed words like 'ave, 'im, 'e, 'er For borrowed French vocab, the spelling was copied, but only words from Germanic were pronounced with [h-] such as haste, hardy, heron, herald.
Romance words were spelled with h- but pronounced without a [h-] sound e. The rule for aspirating only stressed syllables seems to have extended to foreign words such as history and the adjective sometimes spelled historic. After the introduction of printing and standardised spelling, practices and attitudes changed: QUOTE Until the beginning of the sixteenth century there was no evidence of of association between h -dropping and social and educational status, but the attitudes began to shift in the seventeenth century, and by the eighteenth century [h]-lessness was stigmatised in both native and borrowed words.
In spelling, most of the borrowed words kept initial ; the expanding community of literate speakers must have considered spelling authoritative enough for the reinstatement of initial [h-] in words with an etymological and orthographic.
By the end of the eighteenth century, only a set of frequently used Romance loans in which the spelling was preserved were considered legitimate without initial [h-]. UNQUOTE She quotes the influential dictionary by John Walker which — successfully —told people how they must pronounce words: QUOTE At the beginning of words it is always sounded, except in heir, heiress, honest, honestly, honour, honourable, herb, herbage, hospital, hostler, hour, humble, humour, humorous, humorousness.
Ben Johnson leaves out the h in host and classes it in this respect with honest. Henry H. Interestingly, neither list contains hotel. Could it have been a fashion that caught on late in the nineteenth century? Of the Walker list, Minkova comments QUOTE Today heir, honest and hour and herb in AmE and some of their cognates are the only surviving instances of a once widespread phonetic attrition. Influenced by the Donka Minkova book, I used the convention of angle brackets around a spelling —in this case a single letter..
Blogger doesn't like this. It thinks it's illegal HTML and deletes it. The second sentence in my post above should read: Early English dropped some [h-] sounds and some h- letters before a vowel at the at the beginning of words. Another correction. Although I repeatedly rejected the re-interpretation by my spellchecker, it managed to have the last word.
What I typed — several times — was The rule for aspirating only stressed syllables seems to have extended to foreign words such as history and the adjective sometimes spelled istoric [SIC].
If I understand correctly, it's frequent early spellings such as orrible, umour, ermit, umble that constitute the evidence for general early [h]-less pronunciation of most words spelled with h- in French. Crosbie: In the U. James Kabala Yes, Professor Minkova seems to have got that one wrong. I don't think that invalidates the rest of her account, though.
One way it is possible to apply to both Oxford and Cambridge in the same year is if you are applying for a choral or organ scholarship. I think David Mitchell did work in lexicography for a while, didn't he? But I would suggest that anything on You Tube is not meant to be taken too seriously - he is quite famous in the UK, at least as a comedian.
What's the pun? To my mind, it doesn't work very well even if you do drop the 'h'! Southern U. I have never heard anyone pronounce herb, or any derivative thereof herbal, herbivore, etc. Southerners mostly follow the general U. There are still some southerners my mother is one , mostly Appalachian, who don't pronounce an h in humble, which I reckon comes from the original h-less pronunciation.
Few read them, and I usually managed to write three a week. Since then, many more readers and commenters have appeared [AmE ] howdy! As I imagine this larger audience responding to posts about X with "But what about Y?
Sometimes the Ys are other expressions that I could discuss; sometimes they are beliefs about language that may or may not have basis in reality. As a result, my posts have got ten much longer and less frequent. The latter is also due to parenthood and more responsibility at work. But [BrE] hey-ho.
I now look back on old posts and think: I can do better! So I'm going to have [more BrE than AmE] another go at the pronunciation of herb , which I first dedicated six sentences to in the second month of this blog. It's one of a long list of differences for which the folklore is faulty , with people like comedian David Mitchell below assuming and repeating that Americans don't pronounce the 'h' in herb because we think we or the word are French.
The implication here is that the British are not under the illusion that they are French. Except of course that they eat aubergine rather than eggplant and increasingly use -ise instead of -ize and spell centre with the letters in a very French order. And so on. And so forth. Had he just looked it up, he would have found the following information. From the Middle Ages, the word in English was generally spelled or spelt , if you prefer erbe , from the Old French erbe —but sometimes it was spelled with an h , after the Latin herba.
From the late 15th century the h was regularly included in the spelling in English, but it continued not to be pronounced for nearly years. This was not a problem for English, of course. We often don't pronounce written h , for example in hour and honest and heir , and our ancestors didn't pronounce it in humo u r, hospital, or hotel. Change and confusion about these things leads to the oddity of some people insisting that some but not other words that start with a pronounced h should nevertheless be preceded by an , not a , as if the h weren't pronounced.
The h in herb finally started being pronounced in the 19th century in Britain. By this time, the US was independent and American English was following a separate path from its British cousin. Why did the English start pronouncing it then? Because that's when h- dropping was becoming a real marker of social class in England.
If you wanted to be seen as literate or at least not Cockney you had to make sure that people knew you lived in a house , not an 'ouse. This cartoon from Punch reproduced as a postcard for the British Library's Evolving English exhibition illustrates:.
Email This BlogThis! Share to Twitter Share to Facebook. David Crosbie 03 September, For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do.
Twittering away the day at TVsBen. Scrotos Graphmaster Gerbil. Language is dynamic, not static, so even if you knew exactly how the Romans pronounced Latin, you don't know if they had various dialects, too, and it doesn't matter because we're not speaking latin, we're speaking english--the root is of academic interest but of little practical value as guidance for how to pronounce something. You have to judge language by its contemporary standard when looking to the present day, not by a long-dead standard.
Otherwise, where are all the sanskrit fanboys to shout you down about how latin muddled up all the words they stole? Just sayin'. Re: Pet peeve - it's pronounced "herb" not "erb" Tue Jul 09, pm To add to the silliness Herb can be slang for cannibus in the US.
Walkintarget Gerbil Team Leader. Re: Pet peeve - it's pronounced "herb" not "erb" Tue Jul 09, pm Somebody needs their ash kicked to the herb!! ChronoReverse Gerbil Elite. Re: Pet peeve - it's pronounced "herb" not "erb" Tue Jul 09, pm superjawes wrote: Interesting and important take. If you never practice or learn a particular letter in your native language, you probably aren't going to be able to use it in a new one.
MarkD Gerbil. Re: Pet peeve - it's pronounced "herb" not "erb" Tue Jul 09, pm That bit about R and L is true for Japanese, and it drove my wife nuts. To her, Shelly and Sherry are pronounced the same, because they would be written the same in katakana. There literally is no difference, even though we spell them differently. After much confusion on the intercom, Shelly became Shell.
Problem solved. On topic, it's erb around here. You could re-ignite the the soda vs pop wars instead. It's more controversial and just as futile. It could still become 31 days every four years.
Why do Americans drop the 'h' when pronouncing herb? Please try again later. The Sydney Morning Herald. May 29, — Save Log in , register or subscribe to save articles for later. Normal text size Larger text size Very large text size. Rainey, Narrabri Recent borrowings from French have resulted in differing ways of attempting to say them in English. Bob Dengate, Bathurst Who decided, and why, that women's coats are buttoned right over left and men's left over right?
Teresa Vuong, Greenfield Park Not by any person, but through usage. Sue Reid, Fig Tree Pocket Qld The reason men's coats are buttoned on the right stems from the days when weapons were carried under coats left over right for men allowed the dominant right arm to easily extend into a coat or shirt to retrieve a weapon.
John Mamutil, Baulkham Hills Why does hair go grey at the temples first? King Grey, Hair to the throne, always goes to the Temple first.
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