English Spelling Thinks About The Roman Empire

As a scholar of language, and an Anglospheric transplant, I often get asked why it is that Americans pronounce certain words differently. Today the particular query centered around the word “solder” and why it is pronounced “saw-der” by many North Americans who seemingly ignore the letter L. And the answer is: renaissance scholars who thought too much about the Roman Empire.

Really, really!

You see, right up into the middle of the 1700s the word was spelled “souder”, “soder”, or “soudure”. This is a reflection of the fact that the word came into the English language from Old French, where it had been spelled “soudre”,” soudeure” and “souder”.

The Statutes at Large: Ruffhead, Owen (1769)
The Mysteryes of Nature and Arte: Bates, John (1654)

At this point I should note that standardized spelling as we know it today did not exist for most of the period of written English. So to determine historical pronunciations we have to look at the aggregate spellings across a period of time to see how the writers thought the word should have been rendered orthographically. And it is clear that there was no L sound in solder until the 18th century.

So where did it come from? Well from the 1500s English writers were largely all trained in Latin and Greek literature. This created a belief in the prestige of these languages, a product of which was a tendency to link English words to their supposed Graeco-Latin forebears. This is referred to now as a period of “relatinization”, which gave the English language such new spellings as “February” and “receipt”, which had previously been rendered “feverer” and “receit”, reflecting their Anglo-French roots.

The History Of The Antient Abbeys, Monasteries, Hospitals, Cathedral and Collegiate Churches: Stevens, John(1722).
The Second Part of the Institutes of the Laws of England: Coke, Edward (1671).

A number of words were caught in the cross-fire, with their spelling refashioned along Graeco-Roman roots that proved to be incorrect. For instance, the word “iland” was reworked as “island” in the style of the Latin root isla, though its root is actually Germanic and was rendered orthographically in Old English as “igland” and “iegland.” The word “ake” was perceived to derive from Ancient Greek noun ἄχος (ákhos) and was respelled in English as “ache”, though its origins lie in the Old English verb æce.

Purchas His Pilgrimes: Standsby, William (1625)
A Dictionary of the English Language: Johnson, Samuel (1755).

“Solder” was a lucky scientific word that received the relatinization treatment, being refashioned along the lines of its Latin root solidus, meaning “solid”. The new L sound, however, was not pronounced until the early 1900s.

But why so? How come some words shifted to reflect the new spellings and others didn’t?

Well, there is no hard and fast rule, but the guiding force seems to be the commonality of the spoken version of the word versus the written version. “Island” is a far more regularly used word across different speech groups than “solder”, so it makes sense that “solder” would be the one to eventually become pronounced like the spelling.

As for why diaspora communities in North America maintained the older variant, this is a pattern that is replicated across many aspects of the English language. Specific communities settled in North America and took with them their language and their language use which ossified differently than in the source culture. From this North American English maintains the pronunciation of “sodder” , as well as a diverse collection of other words such as the verb form “gotten” and the vocabulary items “horseback”, “teakettle” and “turnpike”.

Regardless of how you pronounce “solder”, or where the pronunciations originate from, one thing is certain. English language orthography has been driving English speakers bonkers for centuries. So much so that the disparity between pronunciation and spelling was the butt of a number of jokes in Shakespeare’s plays, including Love’s Labour’s Lost where the character Holofernes is cast as a pedant who insists that words like “doubt” and “calf” should be pronounced as spelled.

Loves Labour’s Lost: Shakespeare, William (1595)