points by schoen 2 days ago | 0 comments
Pretty much all of the difficulty arises from the transliteration of Greek ψ, υ, χ, and φ, and then inconsistent pronunciations of these letters themselves in loanwords (including pronouncing υ as both /aɪ/ and /ɪ/)!
That's not to say that it's not very tricky, just that the difficulty kind of arises from one core reason.
Edit: OK, one s as /s/ after the c and another s as /z/ between vowels is also tricky and doesn't have to do with Greek.
[–] photon_garden 2 days ago
[–] schoen 2 days ago
Yes, there's a general voicing assimilation to the preceding phoneme for both -s and -ed! (plus an additional epenthetic vowel insertion if the suffix consonant is too similar to a preceding consonant) It took me a long time to learn this because I am a native speaker and did it automatically without thinking or initially without even noticing that it was realized differently in different contexts in the first place. It's a really fun example of how we can do fieldwork on ourselves (gather a lot of data and try to derive the rule).
The English plural suffix follows a standard pattern:
It’s voiced (/z/) after voiced sounds and voiceless (/s/) after voiceless sounds. That’s why it shows up as /s/ at the end of “physics” (/fɪzɪks/). /k/ is voiceless.
The -ics ending of physics comes from a plural.
No helpful pattern underlying the middle “s” unfortunately.