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points by photon_garden 2 days ago | 0 comments

> 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.

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.

[–] 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).