colonel | Sesquiotica

Why do colonel and kernel sound the same? It’s because of a minor coronal peregrination.

I don’t mean colonization – it’s not that somewhere has been invaded by order of the crown. It’s just… well, it’s on the tip of my tongue.

And yours too. Coronal (not said like colonel or kernel; it’s “co-ro-nal”) refers, in phonetics, to sounds involving the tip of the tongue. In other places and ways it involves other high points too, of course – as in other crowns, but we’ll circle back to that. The point here is that the /r/ and /l/ phonemes are both made with the tip of the tongue, and not only that, they’re both “liquids”: they don’t stop or even seriously impede the airflow through the mouth. And they’re not dissimilar; in fact, in some languages, they’re not considered different sounds. But in other languages, they can be subject to dissimilation.

Take, for instance, the word peregrine and the word pilgrim. Both trace back to Latin peregrinus. But in some varieties of some languages, notably some descended from Latin, it is (or was) dispreferred to have two identical liquids too close together. So the first /r/ became /l/ and peregrinus became Old French pelegrinus, which became modern French pèlerin and modern English pilgrim. But we also grabbed the unaltered Latin and made peregrine and peregrination.

But let me not wander too far. The point is the tongue – specifically, the point of the column of the tongue, which is circling back. And I don’t mean circling back just because coronal comes from Latin corona, which refers to a crown (and from that the top of something) but comes ultimately from the circlet shape of a wreath (consider a corona in a solar eclipse), from Ancient Greek κορώνη (korṓnē), which referred first to the shape and then to the object.

No – although there is a kernel of truth in that, it’s that colonel traces to Old Italian colonello, from Latin columna, referring to the column of men that the officer was at the head of. The first l was pronounced /l/, as it was written. But in early French, the column retreated – that is, it circled back, by which I mean it dissimilated: rather than have two /l/ sounds too close together, the first one became /r/, in a sort of photo negative of the dissimilation in pelegrinus. And the resemblance to corona reinforced the effect: a coronel would have been one at the crown, meaning the head, yes?

And indeed in English for some time we wrote it coronel, but then in the 1500s a fascination with the vaunted classical etymology of words took hold. The same affectation that led the o to be stuffed into peple to make people to show its root in populus, and the b to be stuffed into det to make debt to show its origin as debitum, and several other similar instances, led the spelling to become colonel. And for a time a spelling pronunciation (“col-o-nel”) was also current. But ultimately we have kept the changed sound and the reverted spelling. And over time the vowels reduced and merged into the liquid, so “coronel” came to sound like “kernel.”

But what, then, about kernel? This is a word for a grain of corn, one of the columns of grains that grow on the column of the cob. Is that where it comes from?

Not at all. The kern in kernel is none other than corn in a slightly turned form, and corn is originally just an old Germanic word for ‘seed’ or ‘grain’; the -el is a diminutive, and so a kernel is a little grain or the soft seed at the centre of something. The Old English word was cyrnel; the front vowel of -el led the back vowel in corn to assimilate forward. Which is the same movement as happened in colonel, and rather the opposite of the consonant dissimilation between /l/ and /r/. And so, like opposing columns, colonel and kernel have marched towards each other. Or, rather, we might say that the two have slowly sidled towards each other, until they have attained kernel knowledge.*