History and Explanation of Scientific English Pronunciation Convention: PS, PN, PT

Question

A research question on pronunciation

I have been looking for the explanation and history of the English pronunciation convention of not pronouncing the P at the start of double consonant scientific words, in particular the P in Psychology.

It is my understanding that the letter Psi in the root word psyche is pronounced in both the original Greek and in the Latin transliteration, and further that it is pronounced in German, where the word psychology originated.

The intuitive explanation is that the P was dropped because PS is an unusual initial letter cluster in English, and that the history of this pronunciation convention can be traced to the English pronunciation of Latin words of Greek origin, religious words, such as Psalm, and finally that later scientific coinages built on Greek words beginning with PS, PT or PN followed the pronunciation convention for established for Ps.

And so, my questions are, 1) Is this understanding of the explanation and history correct, and if so is there a source in English documenting or even simply asserting this understanding?

2) Is this understanding in error, partially or completely, and was the English language pronunciation convention established in another manner? For example, was the pronunciation convention already established in Latin of its Greek loanwords and English merely copied the Latin? Or do the English pronunciation conventions of PS and PT (Psi and Pi) have different origins and did they establish themselves independently of each other?

Thank you ahead of time

Answer 1

The source The Pronunciation of Latin Learned Loan Words and Foreign Words in Old English indicates that ps has sounded like s since Old English:

Latin p

...

It was not pronounced in initial ps-, as indicated by the fact that in the Psalms the word psalterium always alliterates with words beginning with s; but this is hardly to be regarded as an exclusively OE loss, since it had occurred long before in the Romance dialects, where it even drops out of the spelling of popular words, e.g., It., Span., Port. salmo (cf. ON sálmr).

(Of course, this all happened well before psychology was added to English in the late 17th century.)

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I haven't been able to find any words starting with pt in Old English, but there are a number of words in Middle English.

And they all have alternate spellings without the p:

• tisane (n.) Also tisan(ne, tisain(e, tizanne, tipsan, thisane, thesan, ptisane, ptisan(ne, pthisane, petisane.

• tisik(e (adj.) Also ptisike, ptisic; pl. tisikes, thisicis, ptisicz.

Answer 2

This is just a partial answer, but hopefully it gets the ball rolling.

John Walker's "Critical Pronouncing Dictionary" from 1824 records that "p" was silent as a rule in words starting with ps- and pt- (page 43). That gives an upper bound on the date of this sound change.

As you say, it's pretty certain that the /p/ was pronounced in all of these combinations in Ancient Greek.

The p in ps- and pn- is also pronounced in modern French and German. I don't know what happens to pt-; it seems it might be pronounced /pt/ based on this german bab.la "Pterodaktylus" and this Wiktionary entry "ptérodactyle". This doesn't show how it was pronounced in the variety of Latin that was ancestral to French, since both of these languages have strategies for pronouncing Latinate words based on their spellings, but it does show that the silent "p" in these contexts is not universally shared by European languages, which suggests it developed within English or when words were borrowed into English.