Hello and welcome to a history of the United States. Episode 8, The Starving Time.

Remember that this is a listener-supported podcast if you like the show and want it to continue,

then please support it. You can do this by signing up for membership at thehistoryofpodcast.com

and clicking on the PayPal subscription button.

Membership only costs $5 per month and gives you access to the members-only podcast.

Before we get into things today, I want to address something we talked a bit about last week.

On Twitter, pronunciation has caused a bit of a stir. We've been talking about what the show is going to do about pronunciation in the future, so feel free to send me a message if you have an opinion. But two words which have really stood out to you guys, which I find pretty funny, are, firstly, aluminium.

The British say aluminium rather than aluminium, because we spell it with two eyes.

But the big one, which some people are pretty gobsmacked about, is that we pronounce

lieutenant as lieutenant.

Spelled exactly the same, There is no F in Lieutenant.

It's just because of a very interesting linguistic curiosity. The Lou bit of Lieutenant derives from

the Latin Locus, which means place. This explains the expression in

Luov, it just means in place of. It made its way to English through Old French.

Now, here's where things get confusing, because it's not known exactly why the British pronounce

the U as an F, but it seems that in old French the two letters were very closely related.

This is sort of understandable.

U in Latin could also be a consonant.

This consonant later became the letter V in English, but the consensal U is in Germanic languages very closely related with the letter F.

Just look at the word father, which in German is Varda. Darth Varda or Vader has father in his name, so his relationship with Luke.

It isn't that much a surprise, but it seems that a Germanic reading of the U led lieutenant to be pronounced lieutenant by the English.

It's really strange, and it's the only word I know of with a hidden F disguised as a U in the English language. But if you know of any

...