English
In English orthography, the pronunciation of hard ⟨g⟩ is /ɡ/ and that of soft ⟨g⟩ is /dʒ/; in a number of French loanwords, soft ⟨g⟩ is /ʒ/. In word roots of non-Germanic origin, the soft ⟨g⟩ pronunciation occurs before ⟨i e y⟩ while the hard ⟨g⟩ pronunciation occurs elsewhere; Digraphs and trigraphs, such as ⟨ng⟩, ⟨gg⟩, and ⟨dge⟩, have their own pronunciation rules.
Notable exceptions include words of Greco-Romance origin, such as algae. (Other notable irregularities include margarine and mortgagor, pronounced with a soft ⟨g⟩; gaol and gaoler, alternative spellings of jail and jailer; as well as a few American English spellings such as judgment and abridgment, pronounced the same as the more-common-in-British English spellings judgement and abridgement.)
While ⟨c⟩, which also has hard and soft pronunciations, exists alongside ⟨k⟩ (which always indicates a hard pronunciation), ⟨g⟩ has no analogous letter or letter combination which consistently indicates a hard ⟨g⟩ sound, even though English uses ⟨j⟩ consistently for the soft ⟨g⟩ sound. This leads to special issues regarding the "neatness" of orthography when suffixes are added to words that end in a hard-⟨g⟩ sound.
Read more about this topic: Hard And Soft G
Famous quotes containing the word english:
“From alle wymmen mi love is lent
And lyht on Alysoun.”
—Unknown. Alison. . .
Oxford Book of English Verse, The, 1250–1918. Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, ed. (New ed., rev. and enl., 1939)
“The explanation of the propensity of the English people to portrait painting is to be found in their relish for a Fact. Let a man do the grandest things, fight the greatest battles, or be distinguished by the most brilliant personal heroism, yet the English people would prefer his portrait to a painting of the great deed. The likeness they can judge of; his existence is a Fact. But the truth of the picture of his deeds they cannot judge of, for they have no imagination.”
—Benjamin Haydon (1786–1846)
“We talked about and that has always been a puzzle to me
why American men think that success is everything
when they know that eighty percent of them are not
going to succeed more than to just keep going and why
if they are not why do they not keep on being
interested in the things that interested them when
they were college men and why American men different
from English men do not get more interesting as they
get older.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)