Question: My lovely daughter-in-law, who is one-half Japanese, is troubled (and has questioned me) in regard to the word "colonel." "Why," she asks, "is it pronounced as if it contains the letter `r'? Why is it not pronounced `col-o-nel'?"
I am unable to explain this one. Can you?
Answer: English borrowed the word "colonel" from the French "coronel," and so originally, the obvious way to pronounce the word was with an "r" sound. This pronunciation is still in widespread use today.
So why doesn't the spelling of "colonel" match its pronunciation?
To investigate that question, we have to go back a little further into the word's history. The French word "coronel" is derived from the Italian word "colonnello." When the French borrowed the word, however, they found it difficult to pronounce. In an effort to ease the pronunciation problem, they changed the first "l" sound to an "r" sound. This is quite a common occurrence; when there are two "l" sounds or two "r" sounds near each other in a word, one of them is frequently omitted or changed to a different sound to eliminate a tricky pronunciation. Linguists call this type of alteration "dissimilation."
When English later adopted the word (in the 16th century), the French pronunciation was kept, but the letter "r" was changed back to an "l," making the term look more like the original Italian word and producing the conflict we continue to have between spelling and pronunciation.
Question: Recently during a radio report I heard both "he risked his life" and "he risked death," and it struck me how odd it is that these two seemingly opposite phrases mean the same thing. Has "risk" always had this dual sense?
Answer: Probably just about everyone uses "risk" in these ways without even thinking about it. There's no question, of course, that both are correct. You can say either "she risked her political career" or "she risked political ruin" and mean pretty much the same thing. The common denominator for both uses is that a chance is being taken - that things will turn out well or that things will turn out badly. One of the uses emphasizes the stakes that are being gambled ("life" or "her political career"), while the other emphasizes the result of losing the bet ("death" or "political ruin"), but the meaning is really the same.
Nevertheless, it's almost surprising that the seeming contradiction apparently never raised any murmurs of discontent from language watchdogs or grammarians; one key to its acceptance may lie in the fact that the word, with all its senses, was borrowed directly from the French. Language purists of the time (the latter half of the 17th century) and of later periods couldn't accuse ungrammatical Americans of tainting the purity of a good French word. Even the French spelling, "risque," was retained for a while, though by 1728 it was being anglicized as "risk" at least part of the time. By the early 1800s the French spelling was no longer in use.
The French, in turn, had adopted their word from Italian. It is difficult to trace the word further back than that. Attempts have been made to connect the Italian word to Vulgar Latin "resecare," meaning "to cut off, to hinder or impede." "Resecare" was supposedly the basis of words in some of the Romance languages, such as Italian "risega," "a jutting out." The tie-in is that jutting rocks and other impediments were dangers or "risks"' for sailors. This theory is highly speculative.
The French are also responsible for our adjective "risque," which has retained its French spelling and pronunciation in English. But our "risque" doesn't carry all the senses of the French adjective - we use English "risky" when we mean "dangerous, hazardous, attended with risks." The single sense of English "risque," "verging on impropriety or indecency," was a new sense in French that appeared around 1840, and we were fairly quick to adopt it. Perhaps the French spelling was deemed most appropriate for this word because, to some 19th-century Americans at least, it described behavior that had something of a French quality.