The Story of Zed

mrG — Sun, 15 Dec 2002 06:06:57 -0500

The CBC pop-culture flagship DNTO had a surprising, nay shocking feature on yesterday's program over the reasons we say 'zed' while the American's say 'zee'.

What I first found shocking was how the hosts of the show did not realize that it is not a question of why Canadian pronounce the last letter oddly, but why are the Americans the odd one out? I'd thought everyone knew that English (as a written language) was hundreds of years older than the United States! That was the first shocker. The second was even stranger: Of the experts they contacted, which included paying real money to Google Answers, not one 'expert' source had the literacy in historical detail to realize the question was being asked inside out!

So why do Americans choose Zee? According to The Straight Dope, it's exactly what we were all taught about the topic back when I was in gradeschool:

... it's we the people of the US that changed it, not the other way around. "Zed" comes from the original Greek zeta via Old French zede, and pretty much all English speakers worldwide pronounce it that way. The reason we don't is because we had a pretty major falling out with the people that did

Now there is an epilog to this: There is a reason why Sook-Yin Lee and her fellow Young Canadians are so confused about Zee: The distinction is strongest in US-surrounded Southern Ontario (Sook-Yin is in the prairies) and the Sesame-Street Effect fades by an age graded phenomenon noted by J.K. Chambers in Sociolinguistic Theory: Linguistic Variation and Its Social Significance. Chambers' paper even closes with the prophetic caution to those who are doomed to repeat history:

Even today, newspaper stories regularly spread mild alarm in their Southern Ontario readers with stories reporting the high frequency of "zee" among schoolchildren and inferring from that the spectre of American domination. It is a story that can be written over and over again, generation after generation, unless the newpaper readers come to understand the sociolinguistic difference between a change in progress and an age-graded change. Since that does not seem imminent, newspaper editors will no doubt keep on assigning the story to cub reporters any time they face a slow news day.

I wonder who set Tod up on this assignment ...

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The Story of Zed