Have you ever wondered why some words like write and wrong begin with a silent W?
Of course you haven’t, but luckily for you, I have.
Write or Wrong
spelling
A Touch of Diaeresis
Can you think of an English word, not borrowed from another language, that has an accent or other diacritic? (a diacritic is simply any glyph added to a letter: see here for examples).
Blond on Blonde
You may have noticed yesterday, that I wrote the following, ungainly looking thing:
blond(e)
Why put the E inside parentheses, some of you might have furiously asked? Or perhaps you slammed your fist on the table and angrily wondered why I even bothered including the E at all. Well, as always, I had my reasons, because blond and blonde are in fact two distinct words.
Is “Y” a Consonant or a Vowel?
It’s both – that’s the boring but correct answer. It depends on the context, of course.
Why don’t we usually Pronounce the Letter B after an M?
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:
- Bomb
- Thumb
- Lamb
- Plumb
- Limb
- Tomb
- Womb
- Climb
- Dumb
- Jamb
- Comb
- Crumb
As you can see, it’s a fairly common phenomenon, but what’s the story behind it?
The English Alphabet
Carrying on from yesterday’s look at the NATO phonetic alphabet, I thought today I’d spend a little time thinking about the regular English alphabet in general. It’s something we take for granted, but there are plenty of interesting things about it. Continue reading
“‘M!’ As in ‘Mancy!'”
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 