I hear ya, and I didn’t mean to sound like I was calling you out. (Also, sorry I kept calling you Expanso instead of Exapno :smack: ). But, in my defense, even though I realize it’s just a game (a surprisingly fun one though!), there’s no English pronunciation on Earth that’ll pronounce quay as “ay” or Volkslied as “olkslied” (i.e., with the letters silent). The letters aren’t absent, per se, just unorthodoxically pronounced.
But your general point is well taken – for the “touchier” ones, e.g. marijuana, people can disagree and that’s totally cool. Maybe the u does carry the w sound, and the j has nothing to do with it. And for words like “Wednesday” or “fifth,” people can disagree and both be right, based on how they themselves pronounce a word. S’all good.
You know in my entire life i have never heard anyone pronounce it as Fith, either IRL or movies, television etc. The Two F’s are always clearly heard by me.
I addressed this above. A letter does NOT have to have no effect on pronunciation to be silent. If we accept your claim here then the b in comb is not silent because comb is not a homophone of com and thus ‘omb’ indisputably has a sound that ‘om’ by itself doesn’t have.
Where did people get this idea that a letter that alters pronunciation isn’t silent? If the letter is unvoiced it’s silent, that’s all.
Why not indeed? Do you have an answer?
Umm, you just said that words don’t count if including the letter results in a sound that the other letters by themselves wouldn’t have. The word ‘dossie’ would be pronounced to rhyme with 'Flossie’ or ‘mossy’ according to all the standard rules of English. By your own standard the ‘r’ is not silent because the ‘r’ in dossier has a long ‘a’ sound that the ‘e’ by itself doesn’t have.
I actually happen to like dossier as an answer and think it’s better than February, but it does show what happens when we apply your standard that the letter can’t change the pronunciation the other letters would have on their own.
The word navvy is in all the dictionaries I own and every one online AFAI can tell. It’s in common usage outside the US at least.
But if you have never heard of navvy are you at least familiar with savvy?
And where does the OP say that double letters are discounted? I can’t see that anywhere. The OP explicitly leaves the question open to discussion. You unilaterally discounting it isn’t discussion IMO.
Eh, maybe you’re right. I hear it as “fith” when I say it rapidly, but there’s definitely a niggling “f” in there if I enunciate (see Exapno’s post). You can go with “halfpenny,” if you’d like, although me, not being British, would say there’s just the silent l, not the silent f (i.e., see what rfgdxm said, if I’m reading his tone correctly).
I’m not quite sure I follow you here. “Com” by itself isn’t a word, AFAIK, and if it were, who’s to say that the o couldn’t be long? The meditative aid “Om” has a long o…
I think you’re taking my objection to “racquet” a little too far. Hell, in First Grade we learned the “e” in “dime” is silent, because “dim” has a short “i.” I just don’t think the “q” in “racquet” is unvoiced – it’s in the hard-c (the k) sound, lumped together with the “c.”
I guess my answer would be: the “and/or” is my sticking point. So which in “dock” is silent – the “c” or the “k”? It’s clearly not both, or else we’d pronounce it “doo” or “doh.”
See above. I’m not actually saying that, and if that’s the message you’re taking away, then either you misunderstood or I miscommunicated (or both). I think “dossier” counts because… well, I guess that sort of gets to the matter of the subjectivity here. I can’t imagine an “r” carrying an “a” sound, so it’s gotta be silent. R’s a consonant, a’s a vowel.
Of course, but I’m still gonna maintain (IMO) that double-letters are cheating.
So discuss. Here’s my opinion: it just seems like a different (silent f?) game, and not as challenging. We can have hajj, off, add, error… (although hajj is probably pushing it, and there’s still no double-q outside of Arab place names).
quixotic78, when I referred to the “above” I meant all of the above, not specifically you just because you were the last post. We’re cool.
Borgmann’s book is an exercise in semantic game-playing. He even has a section on whether certain words should be included in the language on the basis of whether they would make good answers to puzzles!
So, from his doubled end-letters alphabet how about -
Me too – that’s what I amended my statement in Post 38 (although I like your rendering of our pronunciation better – Wendsday, with a missing e). Is there any touch of a “d” in your “handkerchief”?
As far as ck goes, I’d say that it’s about the same thing as a doubled letter. That is, two letters with the same pronunciation representing a single sound. Thus I’d say neither is silent nor are either of a doubled letter. The cq in racquetball is about the same, although the u in that word is silent.
As far as v goes, if you don’t accept either of the two suggestions already made (fivepence and vraic), then you’re probably SOL. V is by far the most phonetic letter in English. It’s very rare for it not to be pronounced /v/[sup]1[/sup] and except for the f in of, virtually no other letter is pronounced that way.
[sup]1[/sup] Even in words borrowed from German such as verboten, the usual practice is to pronounce it /v/.
Wow. How do you pronounce Wendsday like that? I can’t think of too many letter combinations off the tip of my tongue that are harder to say than NDZD. How in the sam hill you keep from losing that first D is a mystery to me.
Same thing with handkerchief. NDK takes too long, so I lose the D. Yet I’d say “the fiFth of FebRuary”. I guess this is an illustration that there is no hard and fast rule, rhyme or reason when it comes to individual variances in speech. For example, my Webster’s lists “fith” as the first pronunciation for fifth. That doesn’t mean it’s preferred, but come ON. That feews loik the sime fing as sighing that Cockney doialect is just as standid a pronunci-eye-tion as inny uvva. Dunnit? Innit?
