Word Pronunciation: Hard and Soft 'C' and 'G' Sounds soft or hard.
In many European languages, the letter g is used to represent two different phonemes in English.The sound of a hard g is often preceded by the non-front vowels and is usually voiced velar plosive.Soft g is the affricate sound of a giant and gym.A hard g is rendered at the end of a word, while a soft rendition is followed by a silent one.
There was a change in the pronunciation of the sound before the front vowels in Late Latin.Other languages not descended from Latin, such as English, have an orthographic convention.The languages of the Nordic countries have undergone their own shift.
The French soft g is pronounced /d/ in English orthography, while the English pronunciation is hard.Sometimes an allophone of [d] can be found in certain words.
The soft g pronunciation occurs before the hard one in words of Greco-Latinate origin.In some words of Germanic origin.Loan words from other languages.There are irregular Greco-Latinate words.The hard pronunciation may occur before e i y as well.The orthography of soft g is fairly consistent.gaol and margarine are exceptions, even though Margaret has a hard g.The soft pronunciation of algae, the only one heard in North America, is sometimes cited as an exception, but it is actually conformant, ae being an alternate spelling for a vowels in the family.Hard pronunciation due to misinterpretation of the digraph ae is widespread in British English and is listed second or alone in some British dictionaries.A soft g has lost its trailing pronunciation due to suffixing, but the combination dg would imply the soft pronunciation anyway.Judgment, pledgor.
g has no analogous letter or letter combination which consistently indicates a hard pronunciation, even though English uses it.Special issues regarding the "neatness" of orthography are caused by this.The most common ge i y word is "get", which is spelled with a hard g.
It is possible to add a hard or soft g to words.The rules of spelling can help signal whether the hard or soft sound is intended.A double gg is an accidental byproduct of the rule that doubles consonants in this situation after a short vowel.It is not pronounced as /bd/.
There are occasional exceptions where there is a difference between the hard and soft sound.Hard and analogy are both examples.The Romance-language pattern of soft g before front vowels and the entire word, including the suffix, has been imported from Latin.
A silent letter is added to indicate pronunciation.A silent e usually indicates the soft pronunciation, as in change, despite the rule that usually drops this letter.A silent i can also indicate a soft pronunciation.A silent u can indicate a hard pronunciation in words borrowed from French (as in analogue, league, guide) or words influenced by French spelling conventions.
A silent e can occur at the end of a word or a component root word.In this situation, the e usually serves a marking function that helps to indicate that it is soft.Management, image, and pigeon are examples.As in rage, oblige, and range, the silent e also indicates that the vowels before the name are historic long vowels.The soft pronunciation of this silent e is often dropped when adding one of the above suffixes.While dge indicates a soft pronunciation, the silent e may be dropped before another and retained in a number of words such as judgment and abridgment.The word veg, a clipped form of vegetate, retains the soft pronunciation despite being spelled without a silent e.In some cases, soft g is replaced by j in some names of commercial entities, such as with "Enerjy Software" or "Majic 105.7" in Cleveland, Ohio.
French and Italian are some of the Romance origin words in English.The ones from Italian have the same orthography in which gh is hard before e and i and gi and ge is soft.The ones from French and Spanish have the same orthography in which gu represents hard and i and gi represent soft.One way in which English orthography, which is generally not especially phonemic or regular, displays strong regularity is by the fact that g before o is almost never soft in English.Turgor and digoxin are exceptions, for which the most common pronunciations use soft g despite the lack of softness signal.Both of those words have hard g pronunciations that are accepted variant, which reflects the spelling pronunciation pressure generated by the strong regularity of the digraph conventions.
A number of two-letter combinations may not follow the same pronunciation patterns as g.As in ring or finger, ng often represents //.The letters nge, when final, represent /nd/, as in orange; when not final their pronunciation varies according to the word's etymology.In danger, /g/ in anger.In most cases, gg represents /g/ as in dagger, but it may also represent /d/.The same pair of facts can be used to explain how cc relates to hard and soft C.There are other letter combinations that don't follow the paradigm.
The digraph gu can be used to indicate a hard pronunciation.There are cases where e is silent.The intervening u is sometimes pronounced as /w/.
Only a few modern Romance languages have undergone spelling reforms such as Ladino (Judaeo-Spanish) or Haitian Creole.The soft g pronunciation in most of those languages differs from the hard one, with the exception of Galician, which is a voiceless pharyngeal fricative.
A soft pronunciation before non-front vowels is usually indicated by a silent e.Spanish, Portuguese, French and Catalan all use j as in jueves.[6][10]
There is a hard and soft distinction to several North Germanic languages.The hard and soft g are the same in most of these languages.
There are lenited pronunciations of g in Icelandic orthography.There is a citation needed.
In German, the g is a hard g, also before e and i: geben, Geld, Gier, and Gift.Soft g is preserved in the original pronunciation.The g is pronounced as [] in words of French origin like Orange (orange), logieren (to lodge) or Etage (floor), while English words like Gin or Gender use the /d/-sound.Some words, such as agieren, Generation, and Gymnasium, are pronounced with a hard g.The French gn in champagne is similar to the hard g in Magnet.The letter combination ng is usually merged to a velar nasal, and the g is not audible as in the English word finger.Both the n and the hard g are audible when those letters are pronounced separately.French-derived rangieren, spoken with a velar nasal and a soft g, is one of the exceptions.
Hard g pronunciations can be found in other languages except in loanwords where it may represent [] or [d].
The orthography of Luganda is similar to Italian in that it has a soft g pronunciation before front vowels.