According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, the exclamation 'Zounds!' comes from the phrase 'God's wounds'. This seems to suggest that the original pronunciation rhymed with 'wounds' rather than 'hounds'. Does anyone know if that is the case?
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This may be trickier than you suppose. Some pronunciations have diverged so it is possible that 'hounds' and 'wounds' did rhyme at one point. I suspect that both would have rhymed with the way we currently pronounce 'honed'. I think this is a non-trivial research project so I'll stop at this point. – chasly - supports Monica Aug 03 '15 at 17:48
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@chaslyfromUK: you're quite right that the pronunciation has diverged. However, both "hounds" and "wounds" used to have more of an "oo" sound as in "goose," not the sound of "honed." You may be confusing the "ou" digraph that was taken from French to represent the long /uː/ sound with the one used in words like "soul" that represented a diphthong /ɔu̯/. (These two digraphs were spelled the same but pronounced differently even in Midde English). – herisson Aug 03 '15 at 17:52
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There is already a related question you might want to look at, although I can't find an answer that has a sourced description of the "original pronunciation": http://english.stackexchange.com/questions/24026/pronunciation-of-zounds – herisson Aug 03 '15 at 17:56
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@sumelic - I think you might find that it's not that simple. In the Britain of today the pronunciation of words such as 'goose' varies appreciably according to local accent. As StoneyB has demonstrated there are variations in the pronunciation of 'zounds' itself. In any case, that's why I said I would stop. My point was that it's not a simple question. Your comment confirms that! :-) – chasly - supports Monica Aug 03 '15 at 18:04
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@chaslyfromUK: oh, that's also very true. The "goose" vowel is actually often fairly different from a canonical IPA /uː/, so it's probably better to leave the pronunciation details out. – herisson Aug 03 '15 at 18:09
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@sumelic - anecdotally and from recollections of living there as a child. I think the black-country dialect pronunciation of 'goose' would have contained a diphthong. I'll see if I can find an example on line. – chasly - supports Monica Aug 03 '15 at 18:19
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There is a small island, Soay, which belongs to the Outer Hebrides, where as rumour had it, there still lived a man who pronounced "goose" with a palatal fricative, followed by a three-quarter glottal stop, which L. Toreau, known among his undergraduates at the University of Cabbage-upon-Burp as Ferdinand the Bull, humorously calls a glottal pause in his famous treatise on the Great South-East Icelandic Consonant Shift of the mid-9th century. Sadly, just moments before this person could be recorded reading an excerpt from Nabokov's Lolita, he became catatonic and died shortly afterwards. – Joost Kiefte Aug 03 '15 at 21:07
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@JoostKiefte I believe that legendary pronunciation is now attributed to protracted commercial intercourse with Qwghlm. – StoneyB on hiatus Aug 04 '15 at 01:47
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At the time this imprecation was common wound was variously pronounced, with either /ɑu/ or /uː/,† so both pronunciations are attested. OED 1 reports these spellings: ‹zownes›, ‹zoones›, ‹'zons›, ‹zons›, ‹dzownds›, ‹sownds›, ‹zwounds›, ‹zauns›, ‹'zoons›, ‹zoons›, ‹'dzwounds›, and ‹zounds›
† Regular sound change would call for wound to end up the same as bound and found and sound, as indeed the participle did; but the rounded /w/ at the front interfered with this development. The language didn't settle on /wuːnd/ until the 18th century; in the 16th and 17th centuries both were available. Compare R&J, at the artificial boundary between 'II.i' and 'II.ii':
BEN: ’tis in vain
To seek him here that means not to be found.
ROM: He jests at scars that never felt a wound.
StoneyB on hiatus
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1I don't know if the /w/ can really account for wound not rhyming with bound, because as the past tense of wind, wound does rhyme with bound. – Marthaª Aug 03 '15 at 18:10
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@Marthaª I was adding a note to that effect even as you wrote. I imagine that one factor which drove the /uː/ pronunciation was contrast with the participle. – StoneyB on hiatus Aug 03 '15 at 18:13
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@Marthaª: maybe the past tense was influenced by analogy from other verbs with a vowel change, like "bind-bound." – herisson Aug 03 '15 at 18:16
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@Martha: The /w/ does horrible things to vowels: consider war and car, warm and farm, word and cord, wash and cash, wad and cad, wan and can. Its effects are also somewhat inconsistent (consider swan, swam, wag, wan) so I have no doubt that it could account for wound. – Peter Shor Aug 03 '15 at 20:00
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@PeterShor: My dictionary lists "wan" and "swan" as having the LOT vowel. Isn't that consistent? "Wag" is part of a known class of exceptions, patterning with "swag" or "quack." – herisson Aug 03 '15 at 22:25
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@PeterShor: for me, war and car have the same vowel, as do warm and farm, and word and cord. In my head (which is the only place I usually need to "pronounce" them), I see no problem with wad rhyming with cad or wan with can, though if I say them out loud, I can see how that makes me sound like I'm from Boston or something. (I'm actually from Southern California.) My point, to the extent that I have one, is that I'm not sure you can blame all this variation on that poor /w/. :) – Marthaª Aug 03 '15 at 23:06
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@Marthaª: interesting! Do "born" and "barn" also sound the same for you? It might be that the vowels of "warm" and "farm" split but then merged again in the history of your dialect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English-language_vowel_changes_before_historic_/r/#Card.E2.80.93cord_merger – herisson Aug 04 '15 at 00:36
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@Martha My ascription of this deviation to the /w/ relies on OED 1, s.v. wound. --Which vowel do your war, car, warm, farm &c use? /ɑr/ for /or/ (but not usually for /ɔr/) is a St. Louis shibboleth--"Highway Farty-Far" is a stock local joke. – StoneyB on hiatus Aug 04 '15 at 01:44
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@sumelic, no, born and barn are distinct -- the latter has the same vowel as war, car, warm, and farm, while born has a very similar vowel to word and cord. So I've gotta ask all of you: do worm and warm sound the same to you? 'Cause that'd be... strange. – Marthaª Aug 04 '15 at 04:01
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@StoneyB: the reason I keep my twin sister around is so she can do the IPA stuff. :) (She minored in linguistics. I minored in history, thankyouverymuch.) – Marthaª Aug 04 '15 at 04:04
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@Marthaª: "Worm" and "warm" are distinct for me. As far as I know, for most people for whom "warm" rhymes with "storm," "worm" rhymes with the first syllable of "turmoil" or "murmur." I didn't know before now of any American dialect that preserved /ɑr/ in "warm" unaffected by the "w." Do you know if it is a feature of the speech of people you grew up around, or is it more just a feature of your own speech? Of course, such things can be hard to notice – I personally merge some vowels that my mother keeps distinct, but I didn't realize this until asking her "do these words rhyme for you"? – herisson Aug 04 '15 at 04:19
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@StoneyB: when you distinguish /or/ and /ɔr/, are you referring to the FORCE and NORTH lexical sets respectively? It seems odd that /or/ but not /ɔr/ merges to /ɑr/, when /ɔr/ seems more phonetically similar. – herisson Aug 04 '15 at 04:19
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@sumelic Yes; and now you point it out it is odd. I'm gonna hafta do some digging on this. – StoneyB on hiatus Aug 04 '15 at 11:49
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You can't blame the 'w' for most of the confusion mentioned in these comments: it's actually the 'r'. (It's also to blame for the whole Mary-marry-merry thing.) My sister Marti and I tend toward lexically-influenced pronunciations with somewhat simplified vowels: [ɒ] or [ɔ] for the vowel in "warm", and [o] for "worm", or as close as can be had in English with that 'r' afterwards. – JPmiaou Aug 04 '15 at 15:44
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@Marthaª: Maybe you could leave a comment or answer to this question: Is there another way than ɜr to pronounce the grapheme “or” in words like “world” in AmEng? – herisson Mar 19 '16 at 17:59
