Good question, I’m very glad you asked. There are about ten words in English that end in –mb, but have a silent B. Off the top of my head, I can think of:
As you can see, it’s a fairly common phenomenon, but what’s the story behind it?
If you’re reading this reading this on the day it was posted, there’s a good chance that I’m in Paradise right now. Well, Pairi Daiza, to be more specific, which is the name of a zoo in Belgium. The similarities between the two words are not coincidental though.
I can still clearly remember watching an old episode of Friends when I was much younger, which featured a scene in which Chandler explained that he had dumped a girlfriend because she pronounced supposedly as supposably. I immediately had a moment of panic until I reassured myself that I had been pronouncing the word correctly. I had doubted myself for a second because supposably actually sounds quite natural, and I could easily imagine pronouncing it that way without really thinking about it.
Emmanuel Macron will be inaugurated as French president today, so congratulations to him. We’ll be hearing his name a lot over the next five years, and perhaps more, but we probably won’t be hearing it pronounced exactly the same way.
I imagine that you would have no trouble identifying the sound of the letter T, if I asked you. Or any other letter of the alphabet, for that matter. If you’re young enough, you might still remember the chart on the wall of your primary-school classroom, which perhaps said T for Teddy Bear, or Train. But take a moment to say a few words to yourself featuring the letter T. Not only that, include a variety of words with T at the beginning, middle, and end. I’m quite confident that one or two of those sounds didn’t quite sound like the classic T sound you imagined at the beginning.
Let’s look at the following sentence: Continue reading
This post is inspired by two common and related questions I often see posed online:
Before answering (and mercifully, the answer to both questions is the same, and quite simple), let’s have a look at what word stress actually is. Continue reading
It’s easy to forget that there are other alphabets other than one’s own. Not just languages which use different characters, or languages which use the same Latin alphabet as English, but without some letters or with some additional ones. There are other alphabets which we come across a lot which we don’t think too much about. Like the International Radiotelephony Spelling Alphabet, or as it’s more commonly known, the NATO phonetic alphabet. Continue reading
English-Language Thoughts 