Odd pronunciations

A subscriber has sent in a bundle of queries relating to pronunciations which seem to be perversely avoiding the obvious.

The first is bream, pronounced /brim/ in Australian English and /breem/ everywhere else but particularly in British English.  You would have expected us to follow suit.

I think in this case the best guess is that we have picked up a dialect accent.  The French word brême entered Middle English as brem or breme.  There were several variants of this, including brim and bryme, in early forms and dialectal forms, until British English standardised on bream pronounced /breem/.  I think that one of these /brim/ dialectal pronunciations embedded itself in early Australian English, although we did take the standard English spelling. Our fish is, of course, not the same as the English freshwater fish, but bears a passing resemblance to it.

Next was that old chestnut — /maroon/ or /marone/?

Each year as we approach the Rugby League State of Origin series, we pause again to consider the oddity of Australian English — the pronunciation of maroon to rhyme with bone. Statistics show that about two thirds of us rhyme maroon with bone while the other third rhyme it with moon. The British and Americans go the moon path.  It is not known where we got our preferred pronunciation since the one to rhyme with moon would seem to be the most obvious choice.  There is a suggestion that it is slightly closer to the Italian marrone meaning ‘chestnut’ which is its origin (via French).  More convincingly there is some evidence to say that this is a case of hypercorrection propped up by various teachers and gentrified parents who have insisted that this is the ‘proper’ pronunciation, and who are wary of the pronunciation rhyming with moon because it seems too much like a spelling pronunciation, and therefore has to be wrong!

Now we come to the mystery of the marshmallow.  We would immediately think of the confection but this word does derive from marsh and mallow, an English plant with purple flowers found in fields.  The marsh variety had roots that were originally used to make the sweet.  By the time it became a commercial confection in the late 1800s the mallow roots had been replaced by other ingredients. The plant mallow has always had the first vowel rhyming with pal, so why the adjustment was made, probably in American English, to /mel/ is one of those things that we can’t explain. It must have happened before the confection became popular.

Macquarie Dictionary gives both pronunciations (with the /mal/ one first) so both are possible in Australian English. (I say /melow/, my partner scoffs at this because he is a /mallow/ person.)

Finally we come to Beaumaris, a suburb in Melbourne.  The name was taken from a pastoral run settled by James Bickford Moysey in 1845. He had Welsh roots so he had in mind the Welsh town of Beaumaris (pronounced /buh-mah-ris/).  This town was called after the Norman French castle beau marais (‘beautiful marshes’). The English have returned the first syllable to the French beau and retained the /mah-ris/ pronunciation for the rest.

So what happened in Victoria?  Possibly the /mah/ sound in Welsh is closer to /mo/ than it is to    /mah/ in English.  In finding a convenient sound within the sets of phonemes available in Australian English and in British English, the English went one way and we went the other.

Placenames are always a headache because anything can happen.  There may be no justification in logic for the pronunciation other than it is the one the locals use.

Now does anyone want to discuss Jervis Bay?