A DEADLY SERIOUS DEBATE ABOUT PRONUNCIATION
Mill workers in the frontier town of Larkspur, Colo., saw two men enter a cabin in search of a dictionary. Seconds later, they heard a gunshot.
The Webster’s had not even been thumbed through when mill worker William Atcheson, 23, threw a punch. Teamster John P. Davis recovered and, “true to his Texan breeding and education,” drew a revolver and fired point-blank into his assailant’s abdomen.
The year was 1876 and Davis and Atcheson had just drawn first blood in a dispute that has divided Newfoundlanders ever since.
“One wanted to put the accent on ‘found,’ and the other on ‘land,’ ” said the Rocky Mountain News, which reported on the unusual brawl in its March 29, 1876 edition.
While the modern “noofn-land” is the undisputed leader in the battle over the correct pronunciation of the word Newfoundland, it arose out of a pitched struggle of rival inflections.
“It’s a generational thing, just exactly what the dividing line is I don’t know, but if you’re born after 1970, chances are you primarily put the stress on the first syllable,” says Philip Hiscock, a folklorist at Memorial University and an expert on the Newfoundland dialect.
“And if you’re born before 1950, your primary pronunciation would be to stress the last syllable.”
While pockets of “newfound-land” speakers persisted into the late 20th century, by the Great Depression young Newfoundlanders already considered it outdated and wrong to give all three syllables equal stress.
It was Joey Smallwood, the province’s influential first premier, who successfully championed “nyoo-fn-land,” antecedent to the version we know today, said Hiscock.
After the Second World War, members of the Royal Newfoundland Regiment are also reported to have returned to pronouncing their country’s name as a bizarre mash-up of regional, English and Canadian interpretations.
But among warring camps, the only undisputed sin is when the “land” is degraded into “lund”— a form most commonly spoken by Americans and small pockets of British Columbians.
“In all the documentation and living memory reports we have, ‘lund’ has always been an incorrect pronunciation,” said Hiscock.
“You can say almost anything in the first two syllables, but that last syllable has to have an ‘and’ in it,” he added.
John P. Davis was never apprehended for the 1876 murder. The air was still thick with gunpowder smoke when he disappeared into a Colorado snowstorm and slipped past a posse of vigilantes rounded up to catch him.
Only in 1912, as he lay dying in Peoria, Ore., would the aging fugitive come clean, spurring a bedside “informant” to alert Colorado authorities by letter.
“The Oregon informant says Davis is living in Peoria, and can be had if the Colorado authorities come after him,” read a December 1912 edition of the Denver Post. The tale of the shocking death-bed confession would soon be reprinted in newspapers across the United States.
But Davis, it turned out, was not on his death bed.
He recovered, only to find that he was being hunted by both Atcheson’s brother and the Colorado Springs district attorney.
“It is understood that Davis is now better and regrets having made a confession,” wrote The Associated Press.
It is not known if their efforts succeeded. In 1978, the Douglas County courthouse and any possible records of a trial, were lost in a fire.
At the time of the shooting, Newfoundland was still a remote British colony of 160,000 people. Union with Canada was two devastating world wars away, and even Dominion status would need to wait a generation.
And most tragic for Davis and Atcheson, both men were probably pronouncing the colony’s name correctly.
Whether “new-FOUNDland or “new-found-LAND,” somebody in the fishing colony was probably uttering one of them as Atcheson bled out on the floor of a Colorado cabin 4,000 kilometres away.
“In the 19th century, both those pronunciations, or some version of them, were in use in Newfoundland,” said Hiscock.