Why is "colonel" pronounced "ker-nul"?

Question

makes no sense to me

Answer 1

It’s a messy story, the result of a confusion between two forms of the word that came into English at different times. Its source is the Italian colonna. This, and our column with the same meaning, derive from the Latin columna, because a column of men was reminiscent of the shape of a pillar. There was an phrase in Italian, compagna colonnella, literally the “little-column company”, which referred to the small company of soldiers that marched at the head of a regiment and which was commanded directly by the officer in charge. So that officer became known as the colonnello, the leader of the little column. This shifted into French as coronel but later changed back nearer the Italian original as colonel. Much the same thing happened in English, where coronel was the more common form up to about 1630. For a while after this date both forms were in use until colonel eventually won. At first the word was pronounced as three syllables, but the middle became swallowed, and under the continuing influence of the “r” spelling the “l” in the first syllable vanished.

Answer 2

Colonel is a combination of French and Italian. The French took the word "colonello" from the Italians and created their word "coronelle." English speakers adopted the word sometime in the 16th century and used both versions for some time. Eventually, the English speakers settled on the French pronunciation with the Italian spelling for reasons no one knows.

Answer 3

Here is a funny story I was at my kfc training with a group of others when i was like 16 or 17 and we had to read some crap out loud and I so read the word colonel the way it looks the manager looked at me liked i just performed a sin and told the correct punctuation- so it makes no sense to me either!

Answer 4

"Colonel" is French and, in French, in pronounced with a lightly rolled "L". England adopted the French military ranks and lazily pronounced "colonel" as "kernel".