Mind Your Language | 7 September 2002

Mind your language

‘Coo, coo, coo,’ said my husband. ‘Like a pigeon.’

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Richard Dawkins

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This was not, fortunately, a command, though, heaven knows, it might have been. He was merely giving his opinion, fairly strongly, on how the first syllable of cupola should be pronounced. The next two, he said, should sound like ‘po’ and ‘la’.

It might seem strange that two long-grown-up people should have any doubt about the pronunciation of an ordinary word. Perhaps it reflects a literate society where words may be used freely without ever being said aloud. Why, only this morning, I heard on the wireless an educated and entertaining former servant of the Crown use the word enroach. He said it twice. I do not say there is no such word, but I cannot find it in the dictionary. I reckon he meant encroach.

As for cupola, about which my husband had his own ideas, it is far less familiar to him than the fornices and opercula that fill his waking hours. Anyway, he was wrong. The Oxford English Dictionary says it is pronounced with the stress on the first syllable, which sounds the same as Kew, where they have gardens. The other two vowels are the indeterminate sound so frequent in Received Pronunciation. The pukka version of cupola is just like the rather vulgar Scottish pronunciation of coupon – kewp’n.

In any case, cupola has retained its foreign air, having come into English from Italy only in the 16th century. English writers were happily indifferent to its form, referring during the 17th century to a cupelo, cupolo or cupuloes. Even in 1716 the Protestant Mercury called the dome of St Paul’s a cupilo. The French by contrast made it a word of their own, reserving La Coupole to denote the dome of the institute of the French Academy.