I had occasion to get in touch the with Comptroller of Maryland's office with an inquiry about a refund on our state income tax, and I was reminded of the oddity of that word in English.
A comptroller is someone who controls, or supervises, accounts and expenditures. It came into English from the French contrerolleur and was originally in English conterroller, naturally morphing into controller.
But wait. Sometime in the 15th century, people who saw Latin as a long-established and prestige language, and English as an ill-bred newcomer in need of shaping up, took hold of this word. They saw that French had the word compte, "count," that derived from Latin, and they made conterroler look more like Latin by spelling it comptroller, though it continued to be pronounced "controller."
There has been a fair amount of this jiggery-pokery with English. For example, we pronounce debt as "dett," as the word was spelled in Old French, but that b was inserted to acknowledge the Latin root debitum.
In the comptroller entry in Garner's Modern English Usage, Bryan Garner points out that pronouncing the p in comptroller "has traditionally been viewed as semiliterate," but is inevitably widespread. That's how they say it in Maryland state government and journalism.
