A simple question
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When g is followed by i or e it is usually (but not always) soft, like a j. In many words that want a hard g followed by i, they add a u to make it hard, as in guide. English gets this silly rule from French, though you'll also find it in other languages, like Italian (Giovanni = soft, Guido = hard). G wasn't in the original Latin alphabet -- it was added later to distinguish from the sound of C. Greek had gamma (from the Semitic gimmel), but G is an unrelated development. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G[^]
SterlingCamden wrote:
G wasn't in the original Latin alphabet -- it was added later to distinguish from the sound of C. Greek had gamma (from the Semitic gimmel), but G is an unrelated development.
It was also derived from the "C", hence the glyphs' similarities.
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Ah, English, The language half the world speaks but does not understand. 1500 years of history in 5 minutes: So English is a language of conquest and thievery. Let's start with the native peoples of the British Isles, the Celts. They spoke a family of languages collectively know as Gaelic. Not much of Gaelic is left in the modern English language, I can only think of two words off the top of my head: "knoll" and "qwm" Knoll is a little hill, and qwm us a little valley. Yes, W can be a vowel. Early on The Romans invaded the isles and with them brought Latin and the Roman Alphabet. The Celts had their own writing system, but you know, he who conquerors makes the rules. So the Romans shoehorned their alphabet into Gaelic and started teaching Latin and Greek to the Celts. The problem was that Latin has sounds that Gaelic doesn't and Gaelic has sounds that Latin doesn't, so the Roman alphabet really doesn't work well for the Celtic people. So what do the Romans do? They stick in an H as a marker to indicate the preceding letter is not the Latin pronunciation but rather the local form CH (church), SH (shine), TH (thing), GH (enough), KH (Khanukkah) PH (phonics) and the H itself is silent (honor). Empires don't last forever and the Roman Empire fell. But there is always a new bully to take the place of the old one. Enter the Saxons, a Germanic group who invaded around the 5th century. There was actually a big Germanic push to the isles. Along with the Saxons came the Angles, Jutes, Danes, and Frisians. They were really good at imposing their will. They built castles and formed kingdoms and such. When you think Olde England, it is probably Saxons that you are thinking of. Of course that leads to Robin Hood, Robin was a Norman. The Normans were Vikings that had settled down in what is now France (ever hear of Normandy) Their language was very Nordic, but, just like English, it had evolved into what is now called Middle French, not quite French but way not Swedish by-golly-you-becha. So they Normans invade England which is occupied by the Saxons who are displacing the romanized Celts. And Boom! we get Middle English. Not exactly French, not quite English, way not Latin, Celtic, or Swedish by-golly-you-betcha. After the wars die down and people go back to living the best that they can, weird things start happening. Ethnic and national pride start to surface and people want to go back to the old ways of talking, well almost. Vowels start to shift E's become A's, A's become O's. OO and OU and AU differentiate. Words just st
Member 3333482 wrote:
Japanese has four alphabets.
The Japanese languages doesn't utilize an alphabet. It utilizes three writing systems, of which two are phonetic syllabaries (native inventions) and one logographic (from Chinese).
My GUID: ca2262a7-0026-4830-a0b3-fe5d66c4eb1d :) Now I can Google this value and find all my Code Project posts!
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Why is "digit" spelled with a "g" and pronounced as "dijit"? I mean "g" has a different pronounciation (the one in "gun") in most of the words I know. While, "j" as pronounced in "jug" would fit better in word digit. Any English masters here who can explain?
It's not necessary to be so stupid, either, but people manage it. - Christian Graus, 2009 AD
if we did not do it that way we would pronounce the word "gaol" incorrectly.
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Why is "digit" spelled with a "g" and pronounced as "dijit"? I mean "g" has a different pronounciation (the one in "gun") in most of the words I know. While, "j" as pronounced in "jug" would fit better in word digit. Any English masters here who can explain?
It's not necessary to be so stupid, either, but people manage it. - Christian Graus, 2009 AD
Gene, gyrate, general, geography, geriatric, gist, etc. The letter 'j' didn't exist in English until something like 300 years ago. They made 'i' do double duty, e.g., 'iust' (just). There are some things about English spelling that could be cleaned up, but the general problem is that English is phonetically complex, so a comprehensive cleanup is impossible, and this discourages minor cleanups. For example, English has 50 different sounds, while Spanish has only 30, so English overloads the alphabet.
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So, how would you pronounce 'Featherstonhaugh'?
Henry Minute Do not read medical books! You could die of a misprint. - Mark Twain Girl: (staring) "Why do you need an icy cucumber?" “I want to report a fraud. The government is lying to us all.”
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Probably best you give it a pass then. It's as grueling as an upper level textbook.
The latest nation. Procrastination.
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Why is "digit" spelled with a "g" and pronounced as "dijit"? I mean "g" has a different pronounciation (the one in "gun") in most of the words I know. While, "j" as pronounced in "jug" would fit better in word digit. Any English masters here who can explain?
It's not necessary to be so stupid, either, but people manage it. - Christian Graus, 2009 AD
I'm guessing here, but I would conjecture that the soft pronunciation of an intervocal 'g' in words of Latin origin ('digit' cf 'rigid' and 'frigid') derives from the way classical Latin developed into and beyond the Middle Ages as a continuing spoken language and the lingua franca of Europe for business, the Church and the academic world. The 'i' following the 'g' is crucial: Latin developed into modern Italian with the practice of pronouncing a 'g' as 'hard' as in 'jug' when followed by 'a', 'o' and 'u', and soft as in 'digit' when followed by 'i' or 'e'.
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I refer the honourable gentleman to List_of_names_in_English_with_counterintuitive_pronunciations[^]. Unless there is an explanation there, I have no idea why, or how, it came to be spelled/pronounced that way. It is one of those that is well known to those that like these sorts of puzzles.
Henry Minute Do not read medical books! You could die of a misprint. - Mark Twain Girl: (staring) "Why do you need an icy cucumber?" “I want to report a fraud. The government is lying to us all.”
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Why is "digit" spelled with a "g" and pronounced as "dijit"? I mean "g" has a different pronounciation (the one in "gun") in most of the words I know. While, "j" as pronounced in "jug" would fit better in word digit. Any English masters here who can explain?
It's not necessary to be so stupid, either, but people manage it. - Christian Graus, 2009 AD
How do you pronouce "ghoti" Answer: fish Enough - f sound Women - short i sound Nation - sh sound Go English. On a slightly more serious note the strange spellings and pronunciations and grammar comes from English being a peasant language that has been taking other languages into dark alleys for years and mugging them for words and sentence constructs.
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Gene, gyrate, general, geography, geriatric, gist, etc. The letter 'j' didn't exist in English until something like 300 years ago. They made 'i' do double duty, e.g., 'iust' (just). There are some things about English spelling that could be cleaned up, but the general problem is that English is phonetically complex, so a comprehensive cleanup is impossible, and this discourages minor cleanups. For example, English has 50 different sounds, while Spanish has only 30, so English overloads the alphabet.
Flustrated wrote:
There are some things about English spelling that could be cleaned up, but the general problem is that English is phonetically complex, so a comprehensive cleanup is impossible, and this discourages minor cleanups. For example, English has 50 different sounds, while Spanish has only 30, so English overloads the alphabet.
Nope. It's not impossible. It's being done already, just not formally. I've seen almost illiterate students from my English class in college (please suspend your disbelief) write an entire essay by spelling out words phonetically and with some "IM speak." Not surprisingly, the professor embarrassed him by whispering loud enough just so the entire front row of students could hear her (although probably not intentional). The academic world is just too attached to the oddities of the English language to let it change on its own. The fact that it can't change is because there are many institutions that enforce the current ways. There is an air of accomplishment to knowing something more difficult, and many people are not willing to lose that. It's the same reason why the upper class Koreans resisted changing to a phonetic representation of its language for centuries and instead stubbornly stuck to Chinese characters. The alphabet is a different story. We could incorporate some of the runic alphabet back into English (e.g., thorn), or take things from the International Phonetic Alphabet (which would also serve to help its learners learn other languages as well).
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Member 3333482 wrote:
Japanese has four alphabets.
The Japanese languages doesn't utilize an alphabet. It utilizes three writing systems, of which two are phonetic syllabaries (native inventions) and one logographic (from Chinese).
My GUID: ca2262a7-0026-4830-a0b3-fe5d66c4eb1d :) Now I can Google this value and find all my Code Project posts!
Silly me, Hiragana and Katakana are not alphabets. What was I thinking: a fixed, standardized set of written symbols to represent sounds combined to build words. Sounds like an alphabet to me. Granted, Kanji is not an alphabet in the traditional sense that it is not phonetic. But Romanji definitely is. And for the sake of dumbing it down, we just refer to all writing systems Runes to Hieroglyphs and alphabets. The Average person does not really care about the difference between symbolic phonics and letters.
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Why is "digit" spelled with a "g" and pronounced as "dijit"? I mean "g" has a different pronounciation (the one in "gun") in most of the words I know. While, "j" as pronounced in "jug" would fit better in word digit. Any English masters here who can explain?
It's not necessary to be so stupid, either, but people manage it. - Christian Graus, 2009 AD
Here, I fixed it. -Kasterborus
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I refer the honourable gentleman to List_of_names_in_English_with_counterintuitive_pronunciations[^]. Unless there is an explanation there, I have no idea why, or how, it came to be spelled/pronounced that way. It is one of those that is well known to those that like these sorts of puzzles.
Henry Minute Do not read medical books! You could die of a misprint. - Mark Twain Girl: (staring) "Why do you need an icy cucumber?" “I want to report a fraud. The government is lying to us all.”
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It'd not an English word but a borrowing so doesn't follow English rules, such as they are.
I hope you realise that hamsters are very creative when it comes to revenge. - Elaine
Steve_Harris wrote:
It'd not an English word but a borrowing so doesn't follow English rules, such as they are.
This isn't limited to English. German is a very phonetic language because it was one of the last languages in Europe to be set down in written form. If you can pronounce it, you can spell it (and vice-versa). However, words originating in a different language don't follow the phonetic rule (and many don't sound like the original either, even though the Germans do try their best...).