I read recently that a Hong-Kong based company with the not-very-Chinese name of Hanson Robotics has teamed up with a Tesla-linked software programme called Optimus to build a humanoid robot (or “bot”) called “Sophia”. Please don’t ask me to explain all the technical terms in that sentence. I can’t undertake to bring my survey of twenty-first-century English as up-to-date as that. But I can perhaps share my thoughts on the name “Sophia”. 

My first response was to check my instinctive assumption as to how the name is pronounced. I have an old friend who rejoices in it as a valued English Christian name, and pronounces it as it has always been pronounced. That pronunciation is demonstrated in an eighteenth-century catch or part-song, which plays with it punningly: “Ah! How, Sophia, canst thou leave thy lover?” which recurs in a changed context to read (or sound) “Our house afire!” with a second line, “Go fetch the engines”, which had earlier been “Go, fetch the Indian’s borrowed plume.” The eighteenth century loved these verbal jokes, and though we rarely treat ourselves to the pleasures of a Glee Club singalong, their texts can shed light on how words were pronounced in the past. 

My rather old-fashioned friend sticks to her guns, and the name her parents gave her, while all around her that name is almost invariably spoken as if were Italian: “Sophee-a”. It’s not hard to see how this has come about.  A number of Italian celebrities – Sophia Loren perhaps most prominently – have usurped the English version of the name. I don’t understand why we have been persuaded that the Italian way of pronouncing it is the only way, but perhaps a film star trumps any common-or-garden English name by a kind of divine right. I regret that. 

You may say that Sophia is a sufficiently rare name in England for it to yield place to a glamorous foreigner. But there are plenty of other examples. A very common one is Maria. This used to be frequently encountered in England, often in combination with another name, such as Anna Maria, or the more recherche Henrietta Maria, Charles I’s queen, who was indeed French and would certainly have pronounced it in the French way originally. But I have no doubt that once established on the throne here she adopted the English pronunciation. Samuel Whiskers’ wife, in the Beatrix Potter tale, was certainly Anna Maria, pronounced as in Black Maria, which preserves its original sound as if in amber. 

It’s fairly clear that we say “Maria” with the second syllable lengthened as in Italian because we have been influenced, not by an Italian but by a Puerto Rican character in an American musical: the West Side Story “Maria” has the additional advantage of being sung. Just as the unEnglish phrase “on the street” appeared in the 1950s and has usurped the long-established English form “in the street” simply because it appeared in the lyrics of a song in Lerner and Loewe’s My Fair Lady – it certainly didn’t feature in George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion on which the musical is based. These are incontrovertible signs that we live in an essentially American culture, and can’t escape it.      

As for pronunciation, the popular singer Mariah Carey, who is (of course) American, has solved the problem by adopting an easily recognizable orthography that we read quite readily as a Biblical spelling: Jeremiah; Hezekiah; Isaiah. No doubt that’s a convenience that bots of all kinds will be adopting very shortly.   

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