Poor Silent Letters!! Crazy English Spelling & Pronunciation. Part 3

Here are a few more illogical spelling-pronunciation disparites in English...

Gnat, gnaw, gnome, gnarl, gnat, deign, foreign, reign, sovereign, sign, ensign, design, resign, etc have a ‘g’ in them when they are spelled but the poor ‘g’ is totally neglected when people pronounce these words!

And where did the intruder ‘k’ come from and place its butts at the beginning of these words: know, knee, knife, knit, knickers and knuckle? Linguists may have come up with some theories but they are not at all digestible to the laymen!

Learners of English take weeks, if not months, to be confident enough to spell the following words correctly although they are able to pronounce them:

psychology, psychiatrist, pneumonia, psalm, psoriasis – the list is too long. The letter ‘p’ in all these words stands as a mute spectator of the illogical rules of the English language spelling reforms! Thank God, at least the ‘p’ in psalm got a dumb friend (l) to company with!

Crazy English pronunciation. Part 2

When I was in fifth class in which I started learning the spellings and pronunciation of English words, my English teacher used to tweak my ear for mispronouncing the word 'hood'. I used to pronounce hood with a long u – something like /hoood/ instead of /hud/. My budding mind, as in the case of any children, thought all the words with ‘oo’ should be pronounced in the same way as in food, fool, noon, mood, soon, moon, loo etc.

Crazily enough, while a number of common words like moon, food, noon, broom, zoom, boon, proof, roof etc are pronounced with a long ‘u’ sound, so many other words with the same pattern take only a short ‘u’ in pronunciation e.g. book, cook, hood, look, wood, foot and so on.

If you think that the confusion is over just after learning these two rules, what about the words like ‘door’ and ‘floor’? Though they follow the same pattern of spelling, the pronunciation is different!

Is that all? Wait! A fourth small group of words (thank God, only two words in this category!) behaves in a totally different way: blood and flood. The ‘oo’ in them rhymes with the ‘u’ in ‘mud’ ‘thud’ and ‘dull’ !

Isn’t English crazy? Please comment…

Flammable vs Inflammable

Hi Guys!

This morning, one of my close friends asked me the meaning of 'flammable'. I said 'easy to catch fire'. The answer slipped out coolly from my mouth. Pat came the next doubt of the buddy: 'what does 'inflammable' mean?' 'Man, these two words mean exactly the same', said I in a Mr know-all tone.

But the next question really was an ordeal for me, 'Why does 'inflammable' has a prefix 'in' while its twin brother 'flammable' doesn't have?'

My friend's doubt, however, caught me thinking, and I spent the next few hours thumbing through my collection of dictionaries and authoritative reference books, besides scrolling through various sites on my computer monitor. At last, I my effort bore fruit. And I would like to share the reason of this spelling disparity between 'flammable' and 'inflammable' with you guys:

'In-' normaly shows negative sense, as in indirect, inactive and insufficient. In fact, inflammable is formed using a different Latin prefix 'in-' which has the meaning 'into'. The aim of this addition is said to intensify the meaning! (crazy English, crazier English people!!)

However, to avoid confusion, today, most of the countries prefer to use 'flammable' in the sense of 'easy to catch fire' because many a times people (especially the uneducated working class) misunderstand 'inflammable' as 'fire-proof'!

Now the real dout is, why in India do we mostly see only the board 'inflammable' on fuel tankers, buildings and so on? Answer is simple: in our country (India) the more complex and lengthy the use of English is, the more impression one can generate. Who cares the disasterous consequences??

Good Night from Jack!
(Nova English Campus)

THE MOST COMMON LETTERS AND WORDS IN ENGLISH (Part 1)

Hi friends!

Do you know which letter in the English alphabet is the most frequently used one? The answer is 'E'. The second place is occupied by 'T' and only the third place, contrary to what most of the English speakers think, goes to 'A'!

And which letter could be the least commonly used one? Guess....? Yes, you are right!! It's the 'Z'. The second and the third places go to 'Q' and 'J' respectively.

The following is a list of all the letters in their order of frequency:

01. E
02. T
03. A
04. O
05. N
06. R
07. I
08. S
09. H
10. D
11. L
12. F
13. C
14. M
15. U
16. G
17. Y
18. P
19. W
20. B
21. V
22. K
23. X
24. J
25. Q
26. Z