Jenny Rebecca Scott

My boyfriend and I have been talking about the word indict. It started with a conversation about whether or not someone who’s been charged with crimes should be allowed to run for the highest office in the US (another conversation for another time). He’s an ESL speaker and pronounced the word with a hard c which sent us down a (relatively short) rabbit hole of why this word is pronounced the way it is.

The modern word indict comes from Latin in (towards) + dicere (pronounce; utter). The two words then became one, indicere. It evolved with Anglo-Norman French into enditer (major changes include i to e and c to t). It then further evolved with Middle English into two spellings endite or indite. I imagine these versions would have the same pronunciation as we now use for indict.

What I find curious is that, passing through Anglo-Norman French and Middle English, the current form of the word gained a new pronunciation but at some moment reclaimed the Latin c. At what point did this happen? My hypothesis is that at some moment when building a formal legal language, the decision makers (!) decided to go back to the word’s roots and acknowledge it’s Latin origin all the while keeping the it’s commonly recognized, evolved pronunciation.

Virtually all ESL speakers I meet remark on English’s lack of apparent sense or rules when it comes to the relationship between spelling and pronunciation. I like to answer that there are rules, sense, and reason, just that one has to unravel them by following the etymological thread. I find this bit fun. To me, it’s fascinating thinking of the history of immigration, sharing of knowledge and culture over millennia that have led to our methods of communication, something so easily taken for granted.