Silence in the Mind’s Ear

“Never make predictions,” Casey Stengel warned, “especially about the future.” But we can’t help ourselves. Now linguistics professor David Crystal (was his last name a self-fulfilling prophecy?) is telling audiences like the one at the Hay Literary Festival that Google will be changing our spelling habits. This development, he predicts, will be all to the good for the English language—not because we will start spelling with as iwth, but because we will drop all those irritating, unnecessary silent letters cluttering our orthography.

Maybe, maybe not. I’m no prognosticator. What interested me about Professor Crystal’s forecast was not so much the observation that commonly misspelled words receive an autocorrect from Google’s search engine, but rather his first example of a spelling ripe for change: rhubarb. My partner is Canadian, and as we were on a long drive, I mentioned the prediction that rubarb was ascendant. “But the h in rhubarb isn’t silent,” he said. “It’s aspirated a little.”

“Once upon a time, maybe,” I said. “Now it’s just rubarb.”

“No, it isn’t,” he said. “Listen. Rubarb.”

“Right,” I said. “No h. It’s like our sixth-grade teachers telling us to pronounce the h in where. But no one does that.”

“Yes, they do. Without the h, it’d be were.”

“But it would still be pronounced as it is now. Like wear.”

“No, there’s an aspiration at the beginning there, too. Listen. Wear.”

“I don’t hear it,” I confessed. “Not when I say it, not when you say it. You say rubarb, I say rubarb.”

“But I don’t say rubarb. I say rubarb.”

I won’t recreate any more of this who’s-on-first conversation. I am recounting it from my point of view—or, to be more precise, my point of hearing. He was aspirating the rh and the wh, I’m sure of it. But my ear couldn’t pick up the distinction. I’ve been in this place before—and no, I don’t think anything’s wrong with my hearing. At a choral camp a few years back, we were rehearsing Rachmaninoff’s famous Vespers with a specialist in Church Slavonic. We kept getting stuck on the word Bozhe, which is (rather importantly) the word for God. Our coach kept saying something that sounded like baw-zhuh, which we would dutifully—and, apparently, wrongly—repeat. She grew increasingly frustrated. “Listen to the difference,” she said. “I say baw-zhuh, and you repeat back baw-zhuh. Do you hear the difference?”

“No,” we chorused.

Likewise, my friends Maria, who is Polish, and Mark, who is American, told me of a phone conversation in which they were trying to agree on a date to get together. From Maria’s vantage point, Mark kept insisting that the 20^th would work, and she kept telling him she wasn’t available on the 20^th. He would reply that he understood her dilemma, so how about the 20^th? She almost hung up on him before she realized that he was suggesting, not the same date over and over, but the 28^th as an alternative. “Listen to the difference,” he told her. “Twentieth. Twenty-eighth.”

“I didn’t hear the difference,” she told me later. “I mean it’s there, it’s very slight, but it’s not enough to make a different word, in my view. English is crazy.”

No doubt teachers of ESL and foreign languages run into this issue constantly. If you cannot hear the sound as it’s meant to be heard, it’s hard to pronounce it as it’s meant to be pronounced. Returning to Professor Crystal’s crystal ball, I suspect the more complicated aspect of any Google-influenced spelling evolution will be these slight—and, to some, inaudible—disagreements about what does or does not constitute a silent letter. Do we all pronounce through as thru? Or do some hit the word somewhere between throo and throw? Would the h-aspirators view a new spelling of rubarb as leaving out part of the word as it’s pronounced? My typing dun leary into Google yields Dún Laoghaire, but I suspect that true Irish speakers hear something very different from what I typed when they give directions to the James Joyce Tower. English spelling is a hornets’ nest, true, but take a whack at it and see how differently we each find ourselves attacked.