I can’t pronounce the word “columbarium” and so the last time my mother and I discussed whether to scatter or inter my father’s ashes, I wound up suggesting we consider “one of those places named after the Latin for doves.”
As workarounds go, this one was especially clumsy — 10 words to take the place of just 1 — not to mention pretentious. Worse, my mother had no idea what I was talking about as she doesn’t know any Latin. Given the surprising number of words I run into like this — tongue catchers I can write but not say like “clerestory” or “disconsolately” — working on my pronunciation would be a logical strategy. Instead, I’ve spent decades opting for evasion. Writing those words here, for example, ensures I’ll never willingly read this piece aloud.
My difficulties with pronunciation mystified my father. A heartfelt advocate for phonics, he insisted it was a simple matter of snapping the words apart into their small, neat blocks. Initially baffled, then exasperated by my tendency to somehow break words at precisely the wrong spot, he concluded I was being deliberately obtuse. How else could I have come up with “devast” and “ating” instead of the obviously correct “deva” and “stating”?
My father himself never met a word he couldn’t pronounce. This confidence was especially impressive because the country in which he spent most of his adult life was not his country of origin, which meant the English he spoke, having been fully molded in that first country, was slightly different from the English of his second country. His accent never stood out to me, but others found it noticeable enough that often someone meeting him for the first time would remark on it and presume they could guess where he was from. Almost always, they mistook his accent for that of a third, but much more familiar, country. Far from being annoyed, my father seemed to relish the little flash of superiority he got from correcting these misidentifications.
It’d be easy to blame this accent — even if I never heard it — for my pronunciation problems, but while it’s true that I remain confused about how to pronounce aluminium (surely its aluminum?), the choked mess that emerges when I try to say columbarium owes nothing to any known accent. Instead, between the word in my mind and word in my mouth, the sounds swirl and catch as if that space has filled with feathers.
Even as his dementia deepened, my father could still correct my pronunciation on complex and obscure vocabulary. Simpler words, however, sometimes hopped out of his reach. One afternoon, after a round of coughing, he gestured at his throat, “there’s some…some,” looking at me lost for a moment before trying again, “some…some…remnant!”
Remnant wasn’t the word he’d wanted. It was the word next to the right word, but it must have been waving at him hard as that kid so convinced she’s got the right answer she’s about to tumble off her seat, her arm so frantic she’s got to brace it with her other hand.
My father found such pushiness distasteful, not just in me, but in the natural world. He had a low opinion of doves for just this reason. Watching them try to balance on the narrow rail of the birdfeeder in his backyard, he’d complain they chased away the smaller birds — the titmice and chickadees and juncos — while kicking out half the seed besides. Even on the ground they made a mess, splashing through those remnants on their clumsy feet.
My father wouldn’t have hesitated over the word columbarium. He’d have chopped it right up, sounded out the parts for me once, twice, even a third time before he lost patience. In my mind, I’ve tried to summon up his voice, exaggerating those syl-la-ble-s in the accent he supposedly had — his real accent, not the one so many people mistook it for.
All I can hear is feathers.
Image by Julian Hanslmaier on Unsplash.com, licensed under CC 2.0.
- Pronunciation - September 6, 2024