Now that the dreadful Noughties are over, there is much discussion as to how we should pronounce the years of the new decade (the “Teenies”?). Is this the year Two Thousand and Ten or Twenty-Ten?
As I blogged yesterday, I take the view that it is the latter and will certainly be using it. Not only in the interest of speed (it is certainly much less of a mouthful) but also because it is the way we have always done it. The Noughties were an aberration, and it’s all to do with our propensity to pronounce the zeroes in years as “oh”.
For example, how do you pronounce the year 1909? Is it “One Thousand, Nine Hundred and Nine”, “Nineteen Hundred and Nine” or “Nineteen-oh-Nine”? I’d be prepared to lay good money it’s the third, because it’s the one that comes most naturally.
Thus, the Battle of Blenheim was fought in Seventeen-oh-Four and Trafalgar in Eighteen-oh-Five; Asquith became Prime Minister in Nineteen-oh-Eight. Name any year in the first decade of any century since the twelfth and I bet you stick an “oh” in it. It’s so much easier to say.
So why were the Noughties different? Well, probably because the word “twenty” doesn’t end in a consonant. The “y” at its end functions as a vowel, and when two vowels clash, as would be the case if we said “Twenty-oh-Nine”, it would produce an unnatural, jerky effect, a bit like a glottal stop. We try to avoid glottal stops, which is, of course, why we say “an orange” rather than “a orange”.
However, with the end of the Noughties and their intrusive ohs, we can now revert to our usual pattern of pronouncing years.
So “Twenty-Ten” it will be, as far as I am concerned, and I expect that within a few months most people will have abandoned the long form of the date. I may be wrong, but the acid test, as always, will be: what do the Radio 4 newsreaders say?
