Voilà! Ear spellings
Those of us at Eggcorn Central get a lot of mail about things that are
dubious as eggcorns: simple misspellings, word confusions,
morphological reshapings, "demi-eggcorns", etc. Often it's hard
to know quite what to say about particular examples -- "In 1776,
America through off its monarchy", from a posting to soc.motss on
9/26/06; you might not know what to say about this one, until you learn
that the poster is a notoriously unsteady speller -- but every so often
a pretty clear not-an-eggcorn-or-anything-close-to-it case comes
along. I offer you an assortment of spellings for
voilà in English: walla, wallah,
wala, wa-la, wella, wha-la, vwala, etc.
These spellings have been noted several times in the
eggcorn database; Brians's
Common Errors mentions "vwala"
(with distaste) in its
entry for viola/voila; and two correspondents
have written me at moderate length on the subject (one last August and
one today). Here at EC, we are dubious that anything more than
"ear spelling" is going on here; I don't see any evidence of reanalysis
at any level, or of any semantic content introduced in the
spellings. As Pat Schwieterman
wrote
in the Eggcorn Forum on 10/25/05:
Personally, I think it's just a
phonetic spelling rather than an eggcorn. There is a word "wallah" in
English, but it's hard to see that people who use "walla(h)" in place
of "voila" are thinking of the usual meaning of "wallah."
I'd add that the existing English word
wallah (borrowed from Anglo-Indian)
has main stress on the first syllable,
voilà on the second (with, in
English pronunciations of the word, a first syllable either unstressed
or bearing a secondary stress). (In fact, the hyphenated
spellings might be an attempt to suggest primary stress on the second
syllable, as in
ta-da!)
Today's correspondent, Earl Davis, supplied some hits for the "wh"
variant (and suggested that this spelling might be an attempt to
represent the complex onset /vw/ in French):
"Wha-La! Class Schedule!" [blog title]
Finally done and ready for your perusement...MOSAIC CLASS SCHEDULE
Winter 2007... (
link)
"Unfortuneately this gave the younger gneration the liscence to start
feathering the sides of their hair, which eventually lead to chopping
the sides off--leaving only the long hair in the back. And Wha-la: you
have the classic mullet." (
link)
"Splenda is actually just the brand name for sucralose, a sugar
derivative, which is made through a patented multi-step process that
converts natural sugar cane to a no-calorie, non-carbohydrate sweetener
that your body doesn't recognize as sugar or carbohydrate -- so it
doesn't get metabolized. Wha-la! It's calorie-free!" (
link)
My August correspondent, Paul Wolman, suggested that the "wella"
spelling (which seems not to be nearly as common as some of the others,
though the existence of the Wella company makes it hard to tell) might
convey some connection to the English adverb
well -- something like "Well,
there!" -- but I'm inclined to think the "e" is a spelling for a
neutral vowel in an unstressed first syllable. (Still, there
might be a few people who've made a connection to
well. People are ingenious.)
A reflection on why ear spellings should be so likely for this
word. If you've heard the word, you probably know how to use it
in sentences, but if you haven't seen it in print (or don't remember
having seen it in print, or didn't realize that the spelling "voilà
" represented this particular
word), you're in trouble. People tell you to look up words if you
don't know their spellings, but where do you look in this case?
If you don't know French, or don't recognize the French origin of the
word, what would possess you to look under VOI in a dictionary,
especially if your pronunciation of the word begins with /w/ (I think
this is the most common current pronunciation, at least for people who
aren't "putting on", or at least approximating, French)? So you
spell it "the way it sounds".
Posted by Arnold Zwicky at October 23, 2007 03:16 PM