THE PRONUNCIATION OF “RALPH”
I have decided to include a page on this site about the pronunciation of my first name “Ralph”.
It is pronounced in the old-fashioned English way, /reɪf/, so that it rhymes with “safe” and “waif”. My name has always been pronounced in this way by my family and close friends. (I was named after my great-grandfather Ralph L. Wedgwood (1874–1956), who always pronounced it in this way as well.)
Although I hardly ever object when people who don’t know me very well pronounce my name in the way that is most common today /rælf/, I confess that I don’t feel that /rælf/ is really my name at all.
Incidentally, it is potentially misleading to call /reɪf/ a “British” pronunciation of “Ralph”, since it seems that the name was never pronounced in this way in Scotland. It is a distinctively English pronunciation – indeed, it appears to be restricted to Southern England and the English Midlands. (In Northern England – or at least in Northumberland – “Ralph” apparently used to be pronounced /ra:f/, very roughly so that it rhymed with the contemporary American pronunciation of “half” and “calf”.)
OTHER RALPHS PRONOUNCED IN THIS WAY
- It seems overwhelmingly likely that the Cambridge philosopher Ralph Cudworth (1617–1688) pronounced his name in this way, since his father published an edition of William Perkins’ commentary on St Paul’s letter to the Galatians in 1604 under the name “Rafe Cudworth”. (On the other hand, my former Oxford colleague Ralph Walker, whose family comes from Scotland, pronounces the name in the classic Scottish way /ralf/.)
- The name of the character Ralph Rackstraw in W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan‘s comic opera H.M.S. Pinaforeis pronounced in this way, as we can tell from Little Buttercup’s song:
In time each little waif
Forsook his foster-mother,
The well-born babe was Ralph––
Your captain was the other! - The composer Ralph Vaughan Williams pronounced his name in this way.
- The actor Ralph Fiennes (who starred in such films as Schindler’s List, The English Patient, and Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire) also pronounces his name in this way. (On the other hand, the actor Ralph Richardson did not pronounce his name this way.)
THE HISTORY OF THIS PRONUNCIATION
The basic history behind this pronunciation is fairly straightforward. Presumably in Middle English the name “Ralph” (which is an old Germanic name, originally meaning “counsel wolf”) was pronounced in more or less the same way as the Dutch, Swedish, and German name Ralf (roughly like the Scottish pronunciation /ralf/).
Then the pronunciation of English changed. In many cases, /a/ was just replaced by /æ/, which explains why in some areas /ralf/ was replaced by /rælf/. But it often also happened that when the letter “l” appeared in a monosyllabic word between the letter “a” and another consonant, the “l” became silent and somehow lengthened the preceding “a”. E.g. this happened with “half” and “calf”, with “calm” and “balm”, and (in a slightly different way) with “walk” and “talk”.
This change in pronunciation seems to have taken place around the time of the “Great Vowel Shift” that profoundly affected the pronunciation of English, especially in Southern England, between 1450 and 1750.
The emergence of the pronunciation /reɪf/ seems clearly connected with the Great Vowel Shift, since it is around this time that people in Southern and Central England start interchangeably spelling their names both “Ralph” and “Rafe”. (One example is the father of the Cambridge philosopher Ralph Cudworth, who appears to have spelt his name both “Rafe” and “Ralph”.)
With “half” and “calf”, however, even though the “l” becomes silent and lengthens the preceding “a”, the “a” does not become /eɪ/ (it becomes /ɑ:/ in my dialect of British English, and /æ:/ in standard American English). It is an interesting question why it should have become /eɪ/ in “Ralph”.
One intriguing suggestion is that the same explanation applies here as to the word “safe”. The modern word “safe” itself comes from the Middle English sauf or saf, which came from the French sauf, corresponding to the Spanish and Italian salvo, from the Latin salvus. So an “l” has disappeared and lengthened the preceding vowel in the word “safe” as well.
The problem with this suggestion is that the “l” seems to have become silent in the French word sauf long before the Great Vowel Shift began in the 15th century. The change of the vowel in “safe” seems to be exactly the same phenomenon as in words like “make” (compare Dutch maken), “gape” (Dutch gapen), or “shave” (Dutch schaven). So this explanation can only apply to “Ralph” if the “l” went silent sufficiently early so that “Ralph” already rhymed with “safe” (or with the Middle English word saf) at about the same time when the vowel in “safe” turned into the modern sound /eɪ/.
Another possible parallel is the traditional pronunciation of “halfpenny”, which (for obvious reasons) was a very common word in England until the decimalization of the currency in 1969, and in Southern England was pronounced /ˈheɪpəni/.
Whatever the explanation, I love my name. To me, it somehow seems to sum up the quirky historical contingency and poetry of language, all in one sonorous monosyllable….