Have You Been Mispronouncing "Ideonomy" This Entire Time?

One exciting benefit of exploring totally new terrain is the ability to draw the first map.

That’s what I’m appreciating today—the potential to frame and perhaps even decide the debate on the most important question you probably never asked: how should the five-syllable word ideonomy be pronounced?

The first answer is an easy one.

Patrick Gunkel, the coiner of the term, pronounced it “ID-ee-on-oh-mee” with stress on the first syllable and a short “i” sound.

I’ve got extensive documentation to support that.

So if you’re a purist, it’s an open-and-shut case—you’re saying “ID-ee-on-oh-mee” and your first syllable sounds like the beginning of the words idiot and idiocy.

But there’s another alternative.

I spoke to one of Gunkel’s longtime friends, who considered Gunkel a mentor, and he had an alternative pronunciation—”eye-dee-ON-uh-mee,” i.e., stressing the third syllable and using a long “i” sound at the beginning like the words ideology and ionosphere.

I prefer the latter pronunciation, and I’ve reflected this in my articles.

You mean—GASP—you’re not a Gunkel purist?

I can hear the objections and skepticism already.

And maybe I’m ruining my credibility as an objective scholar of ideonomy here… but no, I’m not a Gunkel purist.

I’m a realist, a pragmatist.

I want to put Gunkel’s ideas into action, and that means I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about and analyzing Gunkel’s mistakes.

You may already know this, but if you don’t, you will be interested to learn that Gunkel regretted having to coin the word “ideonomy.”

That’s because the word ideology was already defined as “the science of ideas” in its original meaning.

Ideology was coined around the turn of the 19th century in France by Gunkel’s predecessors.

The French idea scientists, or ideologues, led by the aristocratic philosopher Antoine Destutt de Tracy, had similar instincts to Gunkel.

They felt that scientific processes could be extended to study ideas as the next stage in the Enlightenment project, and they managed to get so far with their program that the French national institute incorporated ideology into its curriculum in the early 1800s.

But Napoleon had a different perspective on the scientific study of ideas.

He recognized that what the ideologues were doing was dangerous to his consolidation of power; he basically ostracized and ridiculed them until nobody in France wanted to be called an ideologue anymore.

When Karl Marx came along a few decades later, he laser-focused his critique on the aristocratic nature of the ideologues and intellectually twisted their efforts, stripping the meaning away from “ideology” and simply looking at the mechanism of transmission.

In other words, Marx found in Destutt de Tracy and his colleagues an Exhibit A example of the elite trying to impose beliefs on the working class in order to control them.

Marx’s critique had legs, and it changed the meaning of “ideology” for good.

The term ideology thus came to mean a sort of dogmatic adherence to imposed ideas rather than the scientific study of them, and the ambition of the ideologues to extend science to the study of ideas was forgotten.

When Gunkel came along over a hundred years later, he couldn’t simply pick up the work of the French idea scientists using their own word.

He had to choose another word.

And so the word ideonomy was born.

Before proceeding with my argument in favor of the long “i” pronunciation, let me first say that Gunkel was neither correct nor incorrect in his pronunciation of ideonomy.

Generally, there’s no correct way to pronounce a coined word in English.

There’s an advantageous way.

There’s a clarifying way.

There’s a helpful way.

And when it comes down to very sticky and possibly contradictory rules of grammar, pronunciation, style, etc., in English—I say this as a former editor—the decision often rests on: “Which approach helps clarify the meaning?”

Clarity often dictates correctness, in other words.

The decision is subjective, but it’s a pragmatic decision because there’s no fundamental ground truth about these matters—at least in English, as well as most other languages.

Clarity aside, there’s also the issue of uptake.

This is a decision related to clarity but also related to heuristics, processing, memory, and transmission.

Do you want to pronounce a coined word in a way that people can easily remember and share? Or do you want to make the whole process more difficult?

Considering these two factors, then—clarity and uptake—I think there are at least three very compelling reasons for the long “i” pronunciation:

Gunkel did not leave, to my knowledge, a written description of why he decided on the short “i” pronunciation. But he appears to have defended this pronunciation vigorously as part of his defense of the word “ideonomy” itself.

I’ve italicized this point because I think it’s really critical.

In shopping around his new science, Gunkel did not appear to separate his intense focus on defending the word itself from the way he was pronouncing it.

He did not realize that the word was landing oddly and unusually in people’s ears for reasons that were not related to the word itself.

In his document, “Objections to Ideonomy and Answers Thereto,” toward the beginning of ideonomy’s Orange Volume, Gunkel even summarized the objection he had encountered from people who had a hard time getting past the name of the science:

And Gunkel’s rebuttal:

With this response, Gunkel shows that he was not distinguishing between how the word ideonomy was sounding to people from the word itself!

Fascinatingly, in refuting objections to his coined term, Gunkel even cited the words economy and astronomy as existing fields of study that supported ideonomy’s legitimacy. And yet he didn’t recognize they had a different stress pattern when pronounced, which halfway defeats the benefit of alignment in the first place.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not giving this objection to the word ideonomy a pass on technical grounds.

Gunkel’s unusual pronunciation of the word ideonomy is not a black mark against the concept of a “science of ideas” itself, but instead speaks to problems with marketing.

I find it odd that someone who was so interested in the way ideas connected did not take more interest in the fact that people were making these associations. It’s all heuristics and pattern matching, right? You hear a new word. You immediately begin to associate it with whatever it sounds like in order to get some kind of information or knowledge about its meaning.

Rather than associate ideonomy with words like astronomy and economy, not to mention the words ideology and idea, some people were hearing the short “i” and completely understandably making the heuristic leap to words like idiot and idiocy—much to Gunkel’s confusion and disappointment.

Gunkel’s refusal to revisit the pronunciation of ideonomy was a minor, though not insignificant, error. It was surely a barrier for some people who had a difficult time understanding and processing what Gunkel was saying about his science.

For future Gunkel scholars, some form of understanding and agreement on the pronunciation of the term would be advisable if public validation and wider recognition is sought.

Someday, perhaps, there will be an inaugural Gunkel conference that will possibly be hosted by the International Gunkel Society.

At this conference, the society would be wise to sponsor a debate and adopt a resolution concerning the pronunciation of “ideonomy.”

It’s not a fatal error if multiple pronunciations exist in parallel.

If a resolution for agreement fails, my proposed fallback would be a sort of informal imaginary play-acting—those realists who pronounce the word with a long “i” can be said to come from planet Earth; meanwhile, those purists who pronounce the word with a short “i” can identify as hailing from Planet Gunkel.

Over time, we will see which strain of ideonomy advocates fare better.

And you can see, given my preferences, what I already believe the outcome will be.