Why is Colonel pronounced Kernal??

Answer 1

A few details are unclear but it happened something like this:

1) The earlier name for this officer was "colonnello", a form found in Old Italian and going back to Latin for "line commander" (through "colonna", meaning "line" from Latin "columna" [cf. "column"]; the Latin name of the officer was columnellus).

2) In Spain, around 1505 (under King Ferdinand), we find an altered form of this word -- "coronel" (which is STILL the Spanish word for "colonel").

How this Spanish form came about is explained as either

a) it was deliberately created/altered to mark the person as an officer of the "crown", i.e., the king (Spanish for "crown" is "corona"); some say this came from confusion about the word's origins
http://www.history.navy.mil/trivia/triv4-5i.htm

OR
b) it was just an example of "dissimilation" -- a natural sound change in which one of two similar or identical sounds in the same word changes.
http://www.yourdictionary.com/library/alike1.html

Shifts of one L in a word to R in Latin and Romance languages are well-known (we see it, for instance, in the adjective ending -al, which becomes -al after words ending with L; thus we have "orbit" > "orbital" but "module" > "modular".. just try saying "modulal" and you'll understand why it was changed!)
http://everything2.com/index.pl?node_id=225168
http://cspeech.ucd.ie/~fred/teaching/oldcourses/phonetics/rules1.html

(My take --very likely, "coronel" came about by dissimilation, and was THEN re-interpreted [not invented] as related to "crown")

3) By 1538 the English are using the word "coronel", borrowed either directly from the Spanish, or from Middle French. By a slight shortening of the vowels (a common enough change) it soon is pronounced /kern'l/. This continues to be THE pronunciation in English.

Meanwhile, the FRENCH shift BACK to "colonel"
http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-col1.htm

(In other words, if you can't see it coming... "the FRENCH are to blame!!")

4) Later (in the 17th century) the form "colonel" was borrowed from Modern French. This was apparently an effort to go back and get the "correct" etymological form. For a time BOTH written forms -- "coronel" and "colonel" -- are found in English, but eventually in the 19th century the pedants who do this succeed in establishing the "correct spelling" as "colonel". BUT they do NOT succeed in getting people to change from the established English pronunciation /kern'l/.

(In other words, the real shift here was adopting the Modern French spelling "colonel". The problem is NOT from the English "messing up" a French word, as some suppose, but because English grammarians showed RESPECT for the French!)

Answer 2

Colonel is from the Middle French "Coronel" (which itself is derived from Latin, I think, for "Little Column") because the colonel often lead the first column of soldiers into battle.

The sound diference is called dissimilation. That is when the speech of a word becomes different from the written word. Another example of this is February (FebYOOWery)

Answer 3

This is a very good question that I have often wondered myself!
My reasoning is that maybe the term was used by the Confederates during the Revolutionary War, hence they speak with a southern drawl, and changed the pronunciation to what it is today.