Boris and His Great-Grandfather

‘Who Do You Think You Are?’ is a BBC television programme in which well-known personalities trace their ancestry. When Boris Johnson, the mayor of London, appeared on it, we heard how his great-grandfather, who was Turkish, was stoned by a mob and stabbed to death. Boris also found that he is descended from King George II and is therefore related to all the royalty of Europe.

In digging up these facts he took us on visits to both Turkey and Germany. Being an educated chap, he can speak some German. Well, sort of. Searching through the state archives in Augsburg (just before three minutes into the clip) he exclaims:

I'm not going to comment on his dodgy command of German word order or the mixed English/German vocabulary (in real German the last phrase would probably be something like ich hab's enträtselt!). What struck me was the baneful influence on him of German spelling. Boris interprets the letter V in the English way, as voiced v, instead of in the German way, as voiceless f. He pronounces Vater as ˈvɑːtə and von as vɒn. In real German they are ˈfaːtɐ and fɔn.

Boris can never have heard any German speaker pronounce those words with a voiced fricative. He is probably familiar with them only in their written form. It is the different spelling-to-sound conventions of English and German that are to blame for his mispronunciation.

Actually, though, the situation is slightly more complicated. Although German v stands for f in most words (Vater, von, verstehen, Vogel, Bevölkerung), there are a few words of foreign origin in which it stands for v. They include, in Germany at least, aktiveakˈtiːvə, nervösnɛrˈvøːs and, importantly for phoneticians, Vokalvoˈkaːl, the word for ‘vowel’.

Poets and Archangels

On BBC R4 I heard the middle name of the poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti pronounced as ˌgæbriˈel.

My partner's name is Gabriel, and it is not unusual for people who do not know him personally to ring up and ask for ˌgæbriˈel.