Byzantine: how do you say it ?

The simplest answer is probably “I don’t”. How often does the word appear in your conversation ? Never ? But one day, for some reason, you might need it - and then how would you pronounce it ?

I always thought it should sound “By-zan-tign”: but I have heard others say “By-zan-teen”, or (more strangely to my ears) “Bizzen-teen”. No doubt, to complete the range of possibilities, we should include “Bizzen-tign”.

How, then, shall we choose ? One approach would be to ask how to pronounce the name of the ancient city from which this adjective is derived: Byzantium. I know no other rendering than By-zant-ium, with the stress on the second syllable. Unless someone out there knows better, I shall continue to call the place By-zant-ium, and it seems only logical to use the same stress on the second syllable of its adjective By-zant-ine.

What precedents do we have for the sound of the final syllable ? We have, in English, Clementine, elephantine and Palestine: yet we also have magazine, latrine and margarine - though these three are all borrowed from French, which accounts for the pronunciation. Vaseline doesn’t count, being a modern trade name. And don't forget clandestine (mid-sixteenth century, from Latin), usually pronounced 'clan-dest-in' just to show how erratic English pronunciation can be.

However, there can be no doubt that our E adj Byzantine (first recorded in the late sixteenth century) is intended to represent a Latin-style 'Byzantinus*', which we may guess would have had stresses on the first and third syllables. We always referred to the Italian dictator Mussolini as ‘Muss-er-lee-ny’. We speak of the composer Rossini with the middle syllable stressed and pronounced ‘ee’; and the famous film-maker Federico Fellini is internationally known as “Felleeny”. Since Italian is directly derived (a long time ago, of course) from Latin, perhaps the Romans used to stress a penultimate ‘i’ syllable and pronounce it as ‘ee’.

* Though the Latin adjective formed from the name Byzantium was actually Byzantius, not Byzantinus.

On the other hand I have always assumed (probably wrongly) that scholars would pronounce the third-century Latin author Longinus ‘Lon-guy-nus’, not ‘Lon-jee-nus’. As for 'Byzantine', The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary of 1954, while seeming to prefer ‘By-zant-ign’, remarks that the pronunciation ‘Bizz-en-tign’ is frequently used among scholars. That’s over half a century ago, though, and the seemingly authoritative BBC English Dictionary of 1993, embodying the advice offered to news-readers and presenters on such matters, is silent on this particular one. Perhaps here’s an instance where anything goes. So we may relax.

Byzantine: how do you say it ?