English has spread widely as an international language, partly because of American global dominance, but mainly, I think, because it has rid itself of a lot of fiddling details that still bedevil other languages. It is not cluttered by diacritical marks, umlauts, accents, cedillas, and the like. It is rarely bothered by gender, whereas in European travel your French feminine shirt is suddenly neutered as you pass into Germany. It is possible to speak faultless English while remaining blissfully ignorant of the subjunctive (though old people sometimes like to play with it as an intellectual exercise).
On the other hand it has a number of ineradicable disadvantages. One is its irregularity of spelling and pronunciation - the 'cough, bough, rough' syndrome is frequently held up to scorn by rivals. Another is its unwillingness to abide by any set of rules - the moment you have sorted out a clear mnemonic the exceptions come crowding in. All the more reason, then, to cling to whatever basic principles can be established.
Take the simple word 'cover' for example. (Pronounced 'kuvv-er', for those of you in the back row.) Characteristically for an English word it has an array of uses. When we put the lid on something we 'cover' it. What we put on it is a 'cover'. The item is then 'covered'. When we take the lid off we 'discover' what is underneath. We tell the world of our 'discovery'. On the other hand if we 'uncover' something we hint that we have found something a bit shady - under-cover. With luck we may 'recover' the stolen goods that have been hidden by the thief. (But notice the subtlety of the language - 're-cover', with the hyphen written or implied by intonation, is something you do only to books, armchairs, and the like.) All this is connected to the basic word 'cover'; and once a newcomer to the language has managed to grasp that we are in the same league as 'lover' (but not 'hover' or 'Dover') then all is plain sailing.
Why on earth then do some people suddenly introduce a different pronunciation? An alternative (older) version of the adjective is 'covert' - still meaning 'with a lid on', and pronounced 'kuvvert'; still intimately connected by pronunciation and meaning to our basic 'cover'. Secret operations are carried out under cover; they are therefore 'covert'. They are carried out 'covertly'. If you happen to be a small wild animal being pursued by red-jacketed men with dogs you may seek cover in a covert, a patch of dense foliage. The owner of the land, in the days when men still wore overcoats, might sport a covert coat, a short overcoat suitable for tramping through the undergrowth covering the covert. If he bred horses he would have his own technical use for the word.
All this richness of language is organised under the word 'cover', and we do language a disservice if we deck it out with fancy pronunciations which seem to indicate that 'covert' is just any odd word that happened to be lying about so we grabbed it. And we make the language just that bit more difficult for the newcomer.
None of this has anything to do with 'cove' [COEv] - a curved inlet in a coastline (or a rather disreputable figure in an Edwardian novel).
But just as you think that it's all very easy really, notice the Cornish village of Coverack - pronounced not 'kuvver-ak' but 'cov-rak'. Ah, well.
1 comment:
wow....i liked every sentence of this article......its very interesting read.
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