Colonel why pronounced kernel

From the moment we learn about silent "e" in school, our innocent expectations that sound and spelling should neatly match up begin to fade away, and soon we accept that "eight" rhymes with "ate," "of" rhymes with "love," and "to" sounds like "too" sounds like "two.

It is what it is. But sometimes English takes it a step too far, does something so brazen and shameless we can't just let it slide. That's when we have to throw our shoulders back, put our hands on our hips and ask, point blank, what is the deal with the word "colonel"?

From borrowing the same word from two different places. In the s, English borrowed a bunch of military vocabulary from French, words like cavalerie , infanterie , citadelle , canon , and also, coronel. The French had borrowed them from the Italians, then the reigning experts in the art of war, but in doing so, had changed colonello to coronel. Why did they do that? A common process called dissimilation — when two instances of the same sound occur close to each other in a word, people tend to change one of the instances to something else.

Here, the first "l" was changed to "r. In addition to country of origin, there is something else at play in the word history of "colonel": written versus spoken language. From the very beginning, when this word came into English in the s, there were two versions of spelling and two pronunciations.

By around the 17th century, the word began appearing in military treaties across Europe. So, the written form of the word colonel and the spoken "kernel" were both being used. In English, a combination won out. Colonel was spelled c-o-l-o-n-e-l but pronounced "kernel. Please let me apologize from the bottom of my heart for our crazy and sometimes confusing English pronunciations!

That's all for this Words and Their Stories. Join us again next week when we talk about more words and expressions in American English. Load more comments. Search Search. Audio menu. Learning English Broadcast. Previous Next. Words and Their Stories. As a result, words pronounced in many dialects of American English as having an "r-colored vowel" e. However, British dialects are varied: Despite the growing influence of non-rhotic RPR over the last several centuries, rural dialects in the west of the British Isles are still rhotic.

When colonel first came into the language, it is unclear how many Brits would have pronounced the r in it and how many would not have done so. In addition, not all Americans pronounce the r. My aunt Virginia, I imagine, was surprised when, growing up as a little girl in Mississippi, she was taught to spell her name and discovered that there was an r in it.