«
»

Chameleon consonants

Of course it’s not only vowel sounds that turn up in various orthographic guises in English. Consonants do it too.

I think ʃ is a pretty good example. It can be represented by <sh> as in ship, <ss> as in pressure, <ti> as in nation, <si> as in tension, <ch> as in Charlotte. The representation <s> used only to be found in the words sugar and sure (and derivatives), but increasingly the <s> in words like student, stew, street is pronounced as ʃ.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 11th, 2012 at 3:17 pm and is filed under Phonetics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.

5 Responses to “Chameleon consonants”

  1. JWL says:
    April 12, 2012 at 12:28 am

    Add sch as in schedule and schwa
    and sk in an old-fashioned pron of ski

  2. John Maidment says:
    April 12, 2012 at 6:31 am

    Ooops, yes.
    Thanks, Jack.

  3. Graham says:
    April 12, 2012 at 9:56 pm

    And ci in ‘technician’

  4. Graham says:
    April 12, 2012 at 9:56 pm

    And ssi in ‘mission’.

  5. John Maidment says:
    April 13, 2012 at 12:12 pm

    Thanks, Graham.

    We should also add <sci> as in luscious.

    And maybe <ce> as in some people’s pron. of licqourice.

Leave a Reply