You wii understand the title of this post by the time you reach the end of it.
Words fascinate me, how written words are put together from alphabetic characters to document the sounds that come from our mouths. This post, like certain others I have written, will delve into some baffling things about our English language. If you do not share my interest in language you may want to leave right now, but I hope you stay because you just might learn something.
Let us consider the letter C. It can feel extraneous because a 'hard C' sounds like K (cloister, crimson) and a 'soft C' sounds like S (ceiling, celebrate). When you put an H after a C, though, you retain the sound of K in some words (choir, chorus, chloroform) but you come up with an additional sound (church, China) or two (charade, machine) in others. And sometimes the very same string of letters produces two different sounds (cello has a CH sound but cellophane has an S sound). It is all very strange.
Putting two Cs together produces several sounds: baccalaureate (K), cacciatore (CH), and vaccination (KS or X as long as it is the X in exit, not the X in xylophone).
The "Gloria in excelsis Deo" so popular at Christmas time has morphed over the centuries. Choir directors everywhere have to teach their singers how to pronounce it. When classical Latin ruled in ancient Roman times, excelsis had a 'hard C' or K sound (ex-KELL-sis). By medieval times when Italianized church Latin was all the rage, the K sound had become a CH sound (ex-CHELL-sis). Speakers of modern English, who see a word that reminds them of excel, excellent, or excelsior, want to sing an S sound (ex-SELL-sis). Many choir directors, however, tell their people to sing an SH sound (egg-SHELL-sis) instead. C grows curiouser and curiouser.
Vowels can also be confusing because there are 'long vowels' and 'short' vowels' and other kinds of vowels. Consider the sound of the letter U in the words lunar (long U), butter (short U), funeral (diphthong), and put (the sound of the OO in book, cook, and look but not the OO in shoot, loot, and boot). Confusion abounds when it comes to trying to learn the English language.
Some words have U twice but the sounds are different (pendulum). Even if you put our old friend C before U two times in a single word, the same phenomenon occurs (cucumber).
I think it is fitting to end this post in the same way my deaf friend Dave W. used to end our conversations, through a humorous combination of fingerspelling and American Sign Language (ASL) signs:
C U later, alligator.
Interesting stuff. Some of these have spelling rules that make sense. Dare ya to cover that next. I had exposure with syllabics in aboriginal languages but don't ask me for information. If you're not familiar with syllabics look it up. For someone with your background, syllabics may make a lot of sense.
ReplyDeleteI wrote a post just about a year ago (Feb. 9, 2022) entitled "You think Hebrew is hard? Try Cherokee" in which I showed my readers th syllabary invented in the 1800s by a Cherokee named Sequoyah. In a comment, you mentioned the Inuit syllabics with which you were familiar. You make a valid point about syllabics. Although there are a lot more symbols than in a typical alphabet, at least everything is always spelled the same way depending on sound, a claim one certainly cannot make about English! Thanks for commenting again, Red.
ReplyDeleteThe thing I have long wondered is how is Khoisan with all the clicks written. Do you know?
ReplyDeleteI remember hearing Miriam Makeba sing in the X!hosa language with its clicks back in the days before she married Stokely Carmichael. I think tthat he '!' or maybe the 'x!' combination represented the clicks. I found much to read concerning the Khoisan people after receiving your comment, but no answer to your question except statements that the orthographies had changed several times since the mid-20th century.
DeleteMy mother thought grammatically in Latin. Ask her what part of speech "That having been done" is and sh'd put it in the appropriate table in Latin, look at the heading and tell you it was Ablative Absolute. I was brought up by her with V as in Vulnero being pronounced Wulnero. I could go on.....and on.....and on.
ReplyDeleteI once wanted to write a weekly column under a pseudonym and direct it to lovers of Latin everywhere. It would have been called The Wayne E. Weedy, Weekly (this is where you are supposed to laugh at the pun based on 'veni, vidi, vici') but I abandoned the idea when my Roman Catholic friends who learned their Latin in parochial school insisted on saying 'vainy, veedy, veechy') and would never have adopted my classical Latin pronunciations. The fact that you and your mother and I are correct mtaters to their kind not one whit. .
DeleteThat's one of the most uplifting comments I've seen for years!!
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