One of the most difficult aspects of English for learners is the apparently random way in which letter combinations can be spelled the same way but pronounced differently.
The noun ‘day’, for example, has the straightforward plural ‘days’. The verb ‘pays’ has the straightforward third person present indicative form ‘pays’ and the straightforward preterite and past participle form ‘paid’ (pronounced as if ‘payed’, and thus in speech perfectly regular). The verb ‘stay’ likewise becomes ‘stays’ and ‘stayed’, in this case even the spelling remains completely consistent but fundamentally the sound of the ending is entirely aligned (i.e. ‘stayed’ rhymes with ‘paid’ and the vowel sound is the same as in ‘stay’ or ‘pay’).
So why, then, does this not happen with the verb ‘say’? The forms are written as with ‘pay’; third person singular indicative ‘says’ and past ‘said’. Surely these too should be pronounced to rhyme with ‘pays’ and ‘paid’ or even, for that matter, ‘stay’ and ‘stayed’.
Here we run into a number of issues with whole concept of “standard” languages and language change.
Firstly, when we say that ‘said’ rhymes neither with ‘paid’ nor ‘stayed’, we are thinking of what we consider the “standard” language – in fairness, this is the one taught to foreigners. In fact, in many dialects, ‘says’ is pronounced as if it were simply ‘say’ followed by the letter -s, and ‘said’ is pronounced as if it were ‘say’ followed by the letter -d; this is common in parts of the north of England, for example.
Secondly, in language change we do have tendencies but few absolute rules; a sound shift may occur fairly regularly, but there will always be the odd exception – perhaps because of the “phonological environment” (a fancy way of saying the sounds around the sound which shifts) or because of the regularity with which a particular word is used. This latter may apply a little here: the verb ‘say’ is more common that the verbs ‘pay’ or ‘stay’, for example.
Fundamentally, what has happened is that the -ay ending of the base verb (sometimes represented in the past form as -ai-) was once pronounced even in the south of England by educated speakers much as it still is by many speakers in the north – as a higher long vowel. When this shifted downwards in the mouth, with the less common verbs ‘pay’ and ‘stay’ (and with the noun ‘day’) the derived forms shifted in the same way – leaving the modern ‘pays’, ‘stays’ and ‘days’ all rhyming across the south of England (and thus in the “standard” taught to foreigners) with the “newer” pronunciation. Yet the shift did not occur in the more commonly used derived forms of ‘say’; ‘says’ and ‘said’ in fact retained their older pronunciation, and then subsequently exhibited a different shift as the vowel shorted (as noted, since the shift did not occur in many northern English dialects in the first place, the derived forms did not need to shift either, so in those dialects they remain aligned).
But that brings us to another point: in fact, in some dialects the division between ‘say’ on one hand and the derived forms ‘says’ and ‘said’ on the other did occur even with the other words. In fact in Northern Ireland, even in fairly educated speech, you will hear ‘days’ to rhyme with ‘says’ with a distinct vowel sound from that in ‘day’ to rhyme with ‘say’ (or perhaps with a longer vowel than in ‘says’, more like the pronunciation in the north of England); likewise ‘paid’ will be distinct from ‘pay’ (again, though, quite often retaining a slightly longer and in fact more conservative vowel than in “standard” ‘said’), and potentially even the vowel of ‘stayed’ will be distinguished from that in ‘stay’.
For most people this is a relatively minor curiosity, but it is exactly this sort of thing – with the variation in different dialects – which enables us, in the absence of written evidence, to reconstruct languages back through time.
Even in Pompeii, for example, we see graffiti including the word veces ‘times, occasions’, which was no doubt an accurate depiction of the current pronunciation at the time but was in fact a non-classical (or “non-standard”) form, as Classical Latin had vices; yet modern “Standard” Spanish does indeed have veces. This is why it is so important to look beyond the “standard” for solutions to linguistic curiosities – and perhaps even an echo of generations long past.
Ian James Parsley 