The polls are closed (well, not actually; if you missed it the first time around you can still go and fill it in). 50% of you chose sus-SINKT as compared to only 30% for suck-SINKT, with another 10% or so using both pronunciations.

Typically, the English letter sequences -cci- and -cce- (and the very rare -ccy-) are pronounced with the first c 'hard' [k] and the second soft [s], just as c is normally pronounced soft immediately preceding e or i. (Really, no responsible linguist uses the terms 'hard' and 'soft' to refer to the variant pronunciations of c and g, but that's how virtually everyone learned it in school, so there you go.) So we have succeed, accident, eccentric, and vaccine, among others. In a smaller number of such words, virtually all of Italian origin, 'cc' is pronounced [tʃ] (or 'ch'), as in fettuccine and bocce, but we can set these aside as recent loanwords.

There are two words of this form, however, in which 'cc' is normally pronounced [s]: succinct and flaccid. Both are of Latin origin, and both have been in English for many centuries. What's more, until the twentieth century, both were standardly pronounced suck-SINKT and FLAK-sid (i.e. they followed the rule). As we can see from the poll results, the process is ongoing with succinct - for instance, I suspect that most of the people who chose sus-SINKT would nonetheless agree that the older pronunciation is also valid. On the other hand, hardly anyone says FLAK-sid anymore. Its present use is mainly restricted to older British English speakers, and many of you would no doubt mark it, not FLASS-sid, as non-standard. The process is virtually complete. Yet many dictionaries list neither FLASS-sid nor sus-SINKT, or list them only as secondary variants.

So why, all of a sudden, would this change occur in two words unrelated except by spelling? Two words: orthoepic piracy.

For the record, while I think this is a fantastic phrase, I didn't invent it, but encountered it in Daniel Coye's 1998 article in American Speech with that very title. And what, pray tell, is orthoepic piracy? It's the term Coye coined to refer to an instance where a word's pronunciation (or 'orthoepy') is re-interpreted (or 'pirated') when speakers are not confident of the pronunciation and another, non-standard, one takes hold. And, as Coye (1998: 183) notes, succinct and flaccid (and perhaps the much rarer coccyx) are undergoing this shift. While this would most often happen with a rare word that is rarely encountered in speech, it need not be so - succinct isn't an everyday word, perhaps, but it surely couldn't be considered rare. For whatever reason, a new pronunciation (Coye calls it a neoepism) comes into existence and is accepted.

But this principle of orthoepic piracy, while useful, doesn't actually explain why the extra [k] sound would be lost in these two words. After all, if one were just guessing based on the spelling, then you'd naturally choose the same pronunciation as you get in common -cci- and -cce- words like accident and succeed. And why now, as opposed to a century ago? These are tricky questions to answer. I might tentatively suggest that the presence of consonant clusters in the vicinity of the -cc- make a difference: [nkt] in the case of succinct, [fl] in the case of flaccid. I won't even get started on coccyx [kaksɪks]. This doesn't solve our dilemma (why not eccentric, which has that nasty [ntr] in there?), but it does suggest how the process would start.

It occurred to me, in thinking about this poll, that if the older pronunciation of flaccid were still widely used, then flaccident would be a tremendous neologism in this age of Viagra. Then I learned that someone beat me to it. Sometimes Google can really show you how unoriginal all your thoughts are. Anyway, with the 'FLASS-sid' pronunciation, it doesn't work half as well.

There is one other common word that violates the general rule that -cc- is pronounced [ks] before e, i, and y: soccer. The explanation is very interesting: originally, the word was socca, and it was a spoken modification of 'assoc.', which in turn was an abbreviation of 'Association football', a set of rules developed in London in the 1860s. The form -cca (like -ccu and -cco) is always pronounced with 'hard' c, or [k]. But, as the word was transmitted from speech into writing, it began to be spelled socker or soccer - the r presumably coming from the reinterpretation of socca as soccer pronounced in a non-rhotic English accent. This is the reverse of orthoepic piracy - it's the reinterpretation of a word's spelling based on its pronunciation, or, shall we say, orthographic piracy? Finally, based on its spelling, the pronunciation SOCK-ah was modified to SOCK-er: orthographic piracy followed by orthoepic piracy. Soccer is, ultimately, a mispronunciation of a phonetic reinterpretation of a modified spoken form of an abbreviation. Got it?

Finally, surely the most interesting -cci- word is floccinaucinihilipilification, the longest word in the first edition of the OED and surely still one of the longest. How would you pronounce it? All right, that's not a fair question. I suspect that 'flocci' is so close to 'flaccid' that most people, even if they know the rule, will tend to pronounce cc as [s] in this case. This is only going to be augmented by the following morpheme 'nauci', so that you get FLOSS-i-NOSS-i-NI-hi-li-PI-li-fi-CA-shun. Or maybe you just skip it. That's what I would do.

Tags: language, wp
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