How did 'Fridge' pick up the "D"

[pulykamell]

I’m not sure about the last part: whenever I see “zh” spelled out like that, it’s in a phonetic spelling used to represent the /ʒ/ sound as in the middle of “treasure.” Like in “Dr. Zhivago.” I’m hard-pressed to think of when it’s used to represent a “z” sound.

[hibernicus]

Never, as far as I know.

[pulykamell]

@hibernicus

(In reality s probably represents the sound /z/ more often than it does /s/ but that’s another story.)

Ah! I misunderstood your sentence. You mean(and wrote) in reality an “s” more often represents a /z/ than a /s/. I read the sentence as “in reality it probably represents.” My bad. Yes, the “s” often gets voiced in context (like, most notably, in plurals of words that end in voiced consonant.)

[hibernicus]

The letter s represents /z/ in:

• some very common function words such as is, was, has, as, these, those, because, his;
• plural marker of nouns other than those ending in /t/, /k/, /p/ and some of those ending in /f/;
• 3rd-person present tense ending of verbs other than those ending in /t/, /k/, /p/ or /f/;
• a large number of frequently-used words like present, rise, rose, lesbian, lose, desert, dessert, misery, busy, phase, fuse…

Taken together it seems plausible that these represent a majority of all instances of the letter “s” in a typical text but I haven’t made any attempt to check.

[Jasmine]

@Akaj

Good lord, are we doomed to obsess about this team forever?

Yes, because it’s all Bears’ fans have. Even worse, I was a toddler and don’t even remember it.

[Akaj]

True – but at least we have that. My friends and I like to remind ourselves, “Hey, at least we’re not the Lions,” who have never even been to a Super Bowl.

[AskNott]

When somebody quoted the headline, “FRIDGE HAWKS LONGJOHNS,” I was reminded of Mr. Perry’s work for the Big Ass Fan Company. They were promoting their fans with BAF t-shirts and such, including a Big Ass Fans Fridge magnet with Perry’s picture on it.

[Kimstu]

@Senegoid

I think this is why some words (often foreign names) are spelled beginning with “Dj”, as in Djibouti. I think this is used in French spellings to indicate the English-sounding “j”, since the French “j” by itself (Jibouti?) is very different.

Yup.

In most cases, English didn’t select the digraph “dj.” The digraph is based on French orthography, like the spelling “Tchaikovsky.” Although this convention originates in a foreign language, it has become part of the conventions of English spelling, and not only in names such as “Django,” but also in some words such as “djinn” (also spelled “jinn”).

The English sound normally represented by the letter “j” (as in j uice ) is called an “affricate,” and can be analyzed as a combination of two parts, the “d” [d] sound of d og and the “zh” [ʒ] sound of trea s ure. Because it contains these two parts, the “j” affricate sound is transcribed as /d͡ʒ/ in the International Phonetic Alphabet. (The tie bar above the two letters is often omitted, so you might just see /dʒ/.)

[BigT]

@Senegoid

But I’m not aware of any English words having this sound and being spelled with “zh”? Are there any? Is it always spelled with “su” or “ge” (like massage) in English words?

That’s exactly why I chose not to use it. Every dictionary I know that uses “zh” would define it as the sound of “s in measure”, which is why I describe it that way.

@hibernicus

It’s by analogy with the unvoiced/voiced pair “s”/“z”, the voiced equivalent of “sh”.
s is to z as sh is to zh.

I suspect that’s the same with /ʒ/ (zh) vs. /ʃ/ (sh) as well. The latter is an alternate form of s (the so-called “long s”). So they grabbed an alternate z for the voiced version—in this case, the Blackletter z (the one the standard American cursive z is based on).

[dtilque]

Someone upthread mentioned adding the K after a C before suffixes. Well they didn’t put it that way, but asked about the K in “picnicking”. This is an obscure rule in English. I remember some time in about 5th or 6th grade the teacher taking 10 or 15 minutes to cover it, after which I expect pretty much everyone promptly forgot it.

Anyway, the rule is that words ending in C that have a suffix added that begins with an E, I, or Y, get a K inserted in between. But only if the C’s hard pronunciation is to be preserved. So “mimicked”, “panicky”, and “picnicking” all get that Special K, while “lyricist” does not. An exception is “arc”: “arcing”, “arced”. Also (based on Googlehits) “Quebecer” seems to be more common than “Quebecker”, although both can be found in use.

[K364]

Amana likes the “D”