Scone geography
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Matthew Smith, "The scone pronunciation map of Britain", YouGov 8/16/2024:
The debate on whether you should pronounce ‘scone’ to rhyme with ‘gone’ or with ‘bone’ has been going on forever. There is evidence of people making light of the distinction as far back as 1913, with a poem in Punch Magazine:
I asked the maid in dulcet tone,
To order me a buttered scone,
The silly girl has been and gone,
And ordered me a buttered scone.
Neither side looks likely to win the argument any time soon however, with a recent YouGov study of more than 54,000 Britons finding that 51% say they pronounce the word to rhyme with ‘gone’ but 45% saying they pronounce it to rhyme with ‘bone’.
The resulting map:
The Wiktionary entry offers a cornucopia of etymological possibilities:
Originally Scots, possibly from Middle Low German schö̂ne (“fine flour bread”), or from Greek σκόνη (skóni, “dust”) or Middle Dutch schoonbroot (“fine bread; a kind of flat angular loaf”), from schoon (“fine”) + broot (“bread”); alternatively, Scottish Gaelic sgonn (“lump, mouthful”).
…but only only one pronunciation — the "gone" version:
The OED etymology omits the Greek and Gaelic option:
But the OED pronunciation gives (versions of) the two British pronunciations, rendered in IPA as /skəʊn/ and /skɒn/:
The OED also gives the same pair for U.S. English, rendered as /skoʊn/ and /skɑn/:
And one version each for Scottish English (/skɔn/), Australian English (/skɔn/), and New Zealand English (/skɒn/):
(As usual, I'm skeptical of the accuracy/value of the IPA versions, though there's certainly a bit of content there…)
You can read the YouGov article for more geographical details — but there's some additional culinary geography fun:
A map that perhaps makes more sense at first glance is our county map showing what order people add jam and cream to their scones. This topic is hotly disputed, with proponents of the so-called ‘Cornish method’ insisting that jam should go on first, while the rival ‘Devon method’ advocates the application of cream ahead of jam.
Fittingly, both counties are the most likely in the country to practice the method that bears their name. However, while the Cornish method is by far the most common choice in Cornwall (80%), the same is not true in Devon, where people are in fact split on whether they go cream first (49%) or jam first (46%).
Given the distinctly red tone of the map above, it is no surprise to see that the overall national results show a heavy lead for jam-firsters, which is practiced by 62% of Britons compared to 28% for the cream-first opponents.
However, there is a glimmer of hope in the long run for cream-firsters. Breaking the results down by age shows that the Cornish method’s dominance diminishes as the public get younger. While fully 80% of the over-70s dollop jam on their scone first, this falls to 48% among the under-30s.
It's probably my ignorance, but I feel that there's less of such detailed geographical socio-food-istics than there could be. (And is there even a word for it?) What I've seen for e.g. U.S. barbecue-sauce variation is not nearly as geographically or statistically elaborated, and is aimed at cooks rather than at social scientists… The YouGov article even shows the cream-jam order by age as well as geography — though not by gender, educational background, etc. :-)…
[h/t Jesse Sheidlower]
Update — Another socio-food-istic point is that U.S. scones are made to be eaten by themselves, without either jam or cream — I don't believe I've ever seen anyone in the U.S. putting jam and cream on a scone, in whatever order.
Seth said,
August 17, 2024 @ 7:20 am
I always thought it rhymed with "stone", due to the Discworld "Scone of Stone" (and if it doesn't, it should – that's enough to make it the preferred form, at least for me).
https://wiki.lspace.org/Scone_of_Stone
ardj said,
August 17, 2024 @ 7:23 am
I am baffled by this pronunciation business and it is small comfort that our revered blogger also admits to confusion over the IPA.
The map of 'scone' speech is misleading, supposing for instance that Edinburgh's niminy muttering is the same as Glasgow's, without going into more detail.
I would certainly not enforce pronouncing the end of "each and every one" to rhyme with "spoon", just to settle where Malcolm should be crowned, though I could certainly conceive of 'scone' rhyming with 'spoon'. But my own RP way of saying 'scone' is as in English 'not' or 'on'. I note that a 1513 quotation gives "the flowr sconnis war set in", which may suggest the correct way to say this much-maligned word. (And scones are round, not triangular, for land's sakes).
Yuval said,
August 17, 2024 @ 7:43 am
Rutland, the North Korea of Britain?
Jenny Chu said,
August 17, 2024 @ 8:45 am
Aren't American scones a different product entirely? Wedge-shaped, sweeter, and often including fruit. Meanwhile, the British scone is much closer to what Americans call a biscuit.
Colin Watson said,
August 17, 2024 @ 8:50 am
Scone pronunciation maps really need to include social class as well as location. When I first met my wife there was much confusion until we worked out that where I grew up (Belfast) rhyming it with "bone" meant you were distinctly posh, but where she grew up (Shropshire) the pronunciation-to-class relationship was just the opposite! (No doubt there are other variables, but the inversion was striking.)
Anonymous said,
August 17, 2024 @ 9:40 am
@Seth – it's worth noting that the real-world inspiration of that, the Stone of Scone (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stone_of_Scone) has a third entirely different pronunciation of "scone", rhyming with "soon"!
Chris Button said,
August 17, 2024 @ 9:45 am
The other debate is whether you put the dollop of jam on top of the clotted cream, or the dollop of clotted cream on top of the jam.
Chris Button said,
August 17, 2024 @ 9:49 am
Oh wait, now I see the article mentions that.
@ Jenny Chu
Yes, American scones are different.
Yves Rehbein said,
August 17, 2024 @ 10:38 am
@ Seth, good point, Terry Pratchett makes the words come alive. Are you per chance missing that it implies stón?
"Spitzer stein" is an isogloss that describes a mostly Low German retention over modern High German ashibilation. https://www.atlas-alltagssprache.de/stein/ Multiple news organs cite Professor Michael Elmentaler to claim that " Der s-pitze S-tein" is dying out. I don't know how it became a set phrase but the rhyme implies a monophtong, as in English stean, and possibly short as in Torsten vs. Þorsteinn, since length substitutes stress accent.
BTW, I was writing a rant about possible comparisos to snack, shnozzle and Schnauze, enunciated /ˈʃɐˌnaʊ̯t͡sə/ for clarity, unsolicited, literaly heared in passing, with a neat reference to "Zischlaut" (i.e. ingressive *tsk*?), but when I returned from dinner the browser had closed and ate my text like naw bra that ain't gone work. It is implied that scone is related to cookie and the respective tense vowel variant, made from chicken egg, of course. Now aren't you glad I didn't say dàn 蛋? :-DDDD
Gregory Kusnick said,
August 17, 2024 @ 10:52 am
Seems to me I've heard it rhymed with "bone" or "John", but never with "gone", which where I come from rhymes with "lawn".
Robert Coren said,
August 17, 2024 @ 11:07 am
I am a member of a New England-based contra-dance community* that holds a (usually) twice-a-year weekend "camp", which has a tradition of tea and scones on Saturday afternoon; this was started some 10-12 years ago by a member of the community (now unfortunately deceased), and I don't know whether his recipe counts as British or USAn (he was the latter). There's always jam and cream cheese available (not the British-traditional clotted cream), and most people use one or both (I usually do just the jam, but if I were doing both I would think cream-cheese-first would be the more practical alternative). Absolutely everybody involved with this tradition pronounces the word to rhyme with stone.
*Anyone who doesn't know what contra dance is, and cares, is welcome to ask me.
John Kozak said,
August 17, 2024 @ 11:09 am
There was a EUROTERROIRS project which built a list of regional foods produced in one locality for three or more generations and still on sale. I have the British volume, which is the British subset of that list presented as text – don't know if the data is available in other formats.
https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=x7MRNAAACAAJ&source=gbs_book_other_versions_r&redir_esc=y
James Cumings said,
August 17, 2024 @ 12:15 pm
Apart from the Scots pronunciation, it's a class thing.
Bloix said,
August 17, 2024 @ 3:11 pm
"Cream" – that is, clotted cream, which is thick enough to spread – is almost unknown here in the US. I put butter and then jam on scones, which I pronounce to rhyme with gone.
PS- cream cheese is fine on bagels but vomitrocious on scones.
Keith Ivey said,
August 17, 2024 @ 4:18 pm
Bloix, do you have the "cot"-"caught" merger, or do you pronounce "gone" with the "cot" vowel?
David Marjanović said,
August 17, 2024 @ 4:50 pm
Seriously? That would be the first epenthetic vowel in a thousand years!
Anyway, Zischlaut just means "sibilant", or "hissing sound" if you're not aiming to sound sciency; and I don't understand why you bring the 20th-century shibboleth annen spitzen Stein gestoßen ("hit a pointed stone") into a discussion of English pronunciation…
Michèle Sharik Pituley said,
August 17, 2024 @ 5:11 pm
@Gregory – John, gone, & lawn all rhyme in my topo/idiolect.
Chris Button said,
August 17, 2024 @ 6:01 pm
@ Bloix
Almost like trying to buy crumpets. Although they do have them at Trader Joe's.
David Morris said,
August 17, 2024 @ 8:58 pm
Definitely not rhyming with 'bone' for me (standard-ish Australian), but my 'scone' is slightly shorter than my 'gone'. New South Wales has a country named Scone, which I automatically pronounced the same way until corrected (it rhymes with 'bone'). I am astonished to learn that the Scottish town/stone isn't pronounced to rhyme with 'bone', but it's one of those words I've only read, not heard.
Yves Rehbein said,
August 18, 2024 @ 8:01 am
@ David Marjanović, I mean the etymology of scone leads with Middle Low German schö̂ne "fine flour bread". The phonology this side of the channel is relevant to the discussion.
It seems to be borrowed unpalatalized, that makes it an interesting problem. Wikipedia relates:
> The phonemic status of /ʃ/ is difficult to determine because of the extremely irregular orthography. Its status likely differed between the dialects, with early MLG having /sk/ (Westphalian keeping it until modern times) and no phonemic /ʃ/, and e.g. East Elbian and in general many later dialects had /ʃ/ from earlier /sk/. If there is phonemic /ʃ/, it often replaces of /s/ in clusters like /sl-/ and /sn-/. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_Low_German#Consonants
As for Dutch schoonbrot (/sx/, Wiktionary), compare German schon "already, yet", English soon
> Cognate with Scots sone, sune, schone (“soon, quickly, at once”), https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/soon
Moreover, I was a proud member of the r/shubreddit dedicated to Sean "Yōḥānān" Connery. Compare John, Jack, flapjacks (Schwedische Haferkekse), Flappy Jack's (a pancake house in an early episode of Family Guy).
Circumstantial evidence of a short vowel can be seen in Middle High German schöne, schönnis, schönpfennig "eine (Gerichts-) Gebühr" https://drw-www.adw.uni-heidelberg.de/drw-cgi/zeige?index=lemmata&term=Schoene
The argument doesn't need to make sense as long as it is entertaining. To compare Jonas, Hebrew yoná "dove" and egg based pancakes or spicy Pfefferkuchen over breakfast is poppycock, that is not going to settle the score on the vowel length of scone, but it was hilarious to think it would at the end of the day. Etymological fallacies sure are fun.
—
As for the Zischlaut *tsk* cf. Pfeifer: "… '(hissing) sound in expression of dissaproval' (beginning 19th century)" https://www.dwds.de/wb/etymwb/zischen translation mine
Bloix said,
August 18, 2024 @ 9:09 am
Keith Ivey: cot and gone have the same vowel.
Joshua K. said,
August 18, 2024 @ 9:43 am
I'm in the USA, and I first learned of scones from a Disney comic book, in which Scrooge McDuck (a native of Scotland) was talking about how he wished he had some scones. His nephews Huey, Dewey, and Louie misheard him at first and brought him some stones.
Hence, we can conclude that the writer of that comic book likely thought that "scone" is pronounced to rhyme with "bone". And that's how I pronounce it myself.
Robert Coren said,
August 18, 2024 @ 9:46 am
@Joshua K.: It had never occurred to me that Scrooge McDuck might be a native Scot, but of course with that surname and the stereotype of the tight-fisted Scot it's not so surprising.
J.W. Brewer said,
August 18, 2024 @ 11:13 am
One similarly hears "shone" with both rhymes-with-bone and rhymes-with-gone variants*, but I don't know how common the "bone" variant is in BrEng (I think of it as more American, albeit perhaps without much empirical basis for doing so) and the extent to which a regional map of UK pronunciations of "shone" would or wouldn't match up with the "scone" map.
*In both cases at least roughly tracking what vowel the particular speaker uses in those other two words, which is obviously subject to dialect variation.
J.W. Brewer said,
August 18, 2024 @ 11:55 am
Further to what Gregory Kusnick said, I got a bit confused trying to figure out the real options here in my own idiolect, and maybe it will be worthwhile to share how I got unconfused. Wells gives LOT, CLOTH, and THOUGHT as three different lexical sets. Americans such as myself who don't have the so-called cot-caught merger do generally have a CLOTH/THOUGHT merger, so our distinction is between LOT on the one hand and CLOTH/THOUGHT on the other. Many Britons, however (including the RP ones used as a reference standard), have a LOT/CLOTH merger (or perhaps more precisely never historically had a LOT/CLOTH split) but distinguish between their LOT/CLOTH vowel and their different THOUGHT vowel.
The practical upshot of this is that a British source saying "rhymes-with-CLOTH-vowel-word" (like "gone") is potentially confusing to unmerged Americans because we can read it as saying "rhymes-with-THOUGHT-vowel word" instead of "rhymes-with-LOT-vowel word."
Like Gregory Kusnick, if I were to utter the doesn't-rhyme-with-bone version of "scone" it would come out on the "cot" side of cot v. caught and thus *not* rhyme with "gone." Maybe the same is true, as I reflect further, if I were to utter the doesn't-rhyme-with-bone version of "shone," but I think I have said and heard that so infrequently in an AmEng context that my intuition feels less reliable there.
Philip Taylor said,
August 18, 2024 @ 1:35 pm
Yves — "If there is phonemic /ʃ/, it often replaces of /s/ in clusters like /sl-/ and /sn-/" — Wikipedia does indeed say that (as of a few moments ago), but what does it mean ? In particular, what rôle does "of" play ?
Philip Taylor said,
August 18, 2024 @ 1:41 pm
JWB — " Wells gives LOT, CLOTH, and THOUGHT as three different lexical sets" — yes, he does, but he also states that in RP "LOT" and "CLOTH" have exactly the same vowel (/ɒ/) [as they do for me], whereas in Gen.Am. the former has /ɑ/ whilst the latter has /ɔ/.
David Marjanović said,
August 18, 2024 @ 1:45 pm
What is that evidence? The nn, if that's what you mean, has a morpheme boundary through it.
Thanks, however, for alerting me that schon and soon are related! It never occurred to me; evidently this is another mysterious s/ʃ mismatch like sollen and shall (also found with /ʃ/ in at least parts of Low German, but with /z/ in Dutch).
BTW, schon is a mess fairly similar to scone – I have long- and short-vowel variants of it myself in my Standard German accent, and my dialect acts as if it were spelled with -an…
That's like not knowing who Luke's father was. :-) Read the collected works of Carl Barks at your earliest convenience! You need a classical education.
They're merged in Scotland. (As [ɔ]; GOAT is [o].)
David Marjanović said,
August 18, 2024 @ 1:47 pm
I bet the "of" is a mistake produced by editing the sentence too often or not often enough. I'll delete it in a few seconds.
J.W. Brewer said,
August 18, 2024 @ 3:12 pm
I may have been unclear. I frankly don't know where there's a variety of English where the LOT, CLOTH and THOUGHT sets have three separate vowels. But even if not, given Wells' overall methodology he needs three different sets to account for the data, given the different ways in which dialects that use two vowels to cover the three divvy them up between those two vowels.
David Morris said,
August 18, 2024 @ 3:32 pm
On further thought, my 'scone' rhymes with 'gon' rather than 'gone', but I can't explain the difference between my 'gon' and 'gone', except that the first is shorter and the second longer.
In Australia, scones and tea are often are sometimes referred to as 'Devonshiire tea', but are always jam-first. I have never seen cream-first, and can't visualise how it would work, given the different consistencies.
Philip Taylor said,
August 18, 2024 @ 4:00 pm
But what is your "gon", David ? Is "gon" a word in your idiolect, or are you referring to a word-final syllable as in (e.g.,) "paragon" ?