I think one basic, important thing to understand that when we talk about why things are pronounced certain ways, we shouldn’t focus on spelling. Spelling, in English particularly, is not a firm basis for understanding for why or how English pronunciation works.
So trying to craft a comprehensive, accurate rule about pronunciation based on spelling is not something I would recommend. So if you’re trying to understand the pronuncation of English vowel phonemes, I would say, don’t start with a focus on letters.
So I’m saying, asking why the letter U is pronounced in different ways is the wrong place to start.
You’re correct, of course. The problem is that the OP thinks that “letters are pronounced.” He has it backwards.
Letters are NOT pronounced. Rather, we use letters to represent pronunciation. Speech precedes writing. English has a rich vowel system which has changed a lot, and the alphabet which English inherited to represent that vowel system is not really adequate to do so on a one-to-one representational basis. Plus, as you note, the words which have come into English have done so from a variety of backgrounds, along with their orthographic issues.
Often people make these threads about how “letters are pronounced” and they are completely missing this fact. I guess it’s because people think that the purpose of phonics is to show children how to speak when actually it’s to show them how to read, by drawing upon the words they already know how to speak.
ETA: Missed your post above, Ascenray, which kind of says what I meant to say.
Letters weren’t just randomly assigned to pronunciations in different words. Letters are assumed to represent certain pronunciations (which is the entire point of letters to begin with). It makes no difference in terms of the question in the OP whether the letters came first or the pronunciations came first. The question remains - why does the same letter represent one pronunciation in some words and represent a different pronunciation in other words? And specifically - why does it apparently represent one pronunciation when it follows certain other letters and represent another pronunciation when it follows certain other ones?
Bottom line is that if what you’re saying has any bearing on this question it’s not at all apparent what that might be, and in any event, you’ve certainly not rendered the question moot via this insight.
The point is that your question is not really about the pronunciation, but rather the spelling–and I agree that’s an interesting and valid question. I didn’t mean to be glib, but only to point out that the title of the thread is misleading, and makes the thread susceptible to misdirection.
Right. There are something like 15-20 vowels in English, depending on one’s dialect and accent. And there are eight letters (A E I O R U W Y) that are used alone or in combination to represent them.
So, yeah, one should expect that any one letter has multiple sounds to represent.
Not in English. Groupings of letters have more of a tendency to represent sounds (but still not perfectly); letters on their own, especially vowels, generally have more than one use each.
And that’s the weird thing about your question, I think (no offence intended) - the phenomenon that you note regarding the letter U is also true of nearly every other letter; the C in ‘cat’ sounds different to the C in ‘scissors’, which sounds different from the C in ‘witch’.
Sometimes this is dependent (with some, but not absolute consistency) on the conjunction with other letters, or the position within the word, sometimes it’s not.
At various times, people have proposed to fix this by standardising spelling, but that idea is doomed to failure, simply because of the diversity of dialects that exist in the English language; if you standardise the spelling of a word, it will work properly in one very narrow context, and will be wrong for everyone else.
For example, the word ‘schedule’; you could standardise this to:
Shedyul
Shedyool
Shedul
Shedool
Skedyul
Skedyool
Skedul
Skedool
(and probably others I haven’t thought of)
Researching quickly, it appears to be a UK English thing.
Note there are three versions given for UK speakers, one with a plain “soo” sound, one with a “shoo” sound, and another with the palatalization that we’re talking about in this thread, as in “syoo.”
(And there are other words where the “s” is pronounced as “sh,” like “issue,” “tissue,” “insure,” “insurance,” etc. )
This phenomenon of palatalization is common in English and also occurs in some/many accents with words like “tree” and “duke” and “educate,” and “Tuesday.” It’s why English “church” isn’t pronounced like Scots “kirk.”
And there’s an explanation for that - c is pronounced like s when it appears before e or i, but only in words borrowed from Romance languages (or Latin), because of a pronunciation change in those languages.
This question has a different explanation; as English speakers shifted from from using an /ɪu/ sound to a sound like the word ‘you’, some combinations of consonants became difficult to pronounce with the changed vowel sound and so the ‘y’ was dropped. And the pronunciation continues to be simplified to a greater or lesser extent in different dialects.
Sure, the detailed answer is related to a different event, but the answer is the same - English is big, broad, old, careless, promiscuous and larcenous
All these digressions into spelling and other letters that have varying pronunciation don’t actually answer the question, though. And of your list really only ‘old’ is relevant, and except for creoles, all languages are old.
I don’t know if you realise it, but your answer above, to the specific case in question, invoked some of the other factors on that list.
I get that you are answering the specific and precise question asked by the OP; I am addressing (what I believe to be) the underlying assumption that this specified case is somehow an exception in an otherwise consistent language. It’s not.
I first read the joke when I was about ten years old. And I almost immediately forgot that the second example of words with an invisible “h” was “sumac.” It was quite by accident that more than forty years later, I came upon the word “sumac” and remembered. It’s just a word that bears very little relationship to anything in my personal experience.
