british-englishcontractionsorthographypronunciation-vs-spelling
I am a British English speaker and often use "shall" and "shall not". When I contract "shall not", I pronounce it [ʃɑlnt] — that is, the "l" sound remains. My question, therefore, is how do I spell it?
I would naturally spell it as "shaln't". I see on Wiktionary that "shalln't" (with two "l"s) is listed as an archaic spelling and shouldn't be used. All other resources I've found indicate that it should be "shan't" — with no "l" — but this is the American English pronunciation, to me.
pro-NOUN-ciation is universally wrong. Even the highly permissive Merriam-Webster dictionary marks it with an obelus (÷). Here is what they say about pronunciations marked with an obelus:
The obelus, or division sign, is placed before a pronunciation variant that occurs in educated speech but that is considered by some to be questionable or unacceptable. This symbol is used sparingly and primarily for variants that have been objected to over a period of time in print by commentators on usage, in schools by teachers, or in correspondence that has come to the Merriam-Webster editorial department. In most cases the objection is based on orthographic or etymological arguments. (source)
As for why the word pronounce has an O between the two N’s and pronunciation does not, it is unclear, but both words derive from French, pronunciation from pronunciation and pronounce from pronuncier. There is probably some variation in the way the different word stress affected how the words were spelled after being borrowed into English.
Obviously, in American English one would expect to see something like the following:
What is not so obvious is that British English has a similar graph on these words:
To prove that these graphs are reliable (at least reliable enough for this answer), graphs of American and British English on license vs. licence follow:
This ties in with what we already know about British vs. American preferences about the word licence/license. And to a degree it proves a point about licensee vs. licencee. It seems certain that licensee is the preferred spelling in either corpus.
And I'm terribly sorry for the gargantuan scale of this answer, but I thought the graphs would be helpful.
Best Answer
The spelling with the l sound is "shalln't". Also, I came across this after I heard it in Stargate SG1.
Season 9 - Episode 4 "The Ties that Bind". About 25 minutes in.
Daniel Jackson is told something along the lines of "we shall have to get used to each other". And he replies "No, we shalln't".
Also, iOS autocorrect will automatically punctuate "shalln't" for you.