Phonics Rules?
"Breaking the phonics rules" was a category in Double Jeopardy today. The first one was "C is usually soft before E but not in this musical instrument" (cello), and the $400 was "English words that end in -int are usually short but not this measurement" (pint).
Okay, good clues. But then we have SH, TH, and PH: "SH not as usual in this insect that can jump six times its length", "like the Order of the Thistle, this British honor as TH but not as in thistle", and "there's a PH but no F-sound in this tiring battle". These words? grasshopper knighthood uphill
That was kind of cheating (though I got "grasshopper" since it was a jumping insect). These aren't single phonemes - they all cross not just syllable but morpheme boundaries.
I guess I was looking for something like, say, Keith or leper or calliope...
3 Comments:
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At 9:09 PM, March 22, 2010
Barry Leiba had this to say...
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At 9:10 PM, March 22, 2010
The Ridger, FCD had this to say...
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At 5:04 PM, March 23, 2010
Q. Pheevr had this to say...
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<-- Older Post ^ Home Newer Post -->Indeed; if you would put a hyphen between them ("grass-hopper"), it doesn't count.
But "cello" is a bad one too, because the "c" is soft there — it's just an Italian soft "c" (pronounced as English "ch"). A hard "c" would have it pronounced "kello"... which it's not.
Yeah, maybe, but it's not "sello" either.
The trouble is, the terms "hard" and "soft" don't have any clearly established technical meaning in the context of English orthography. A "hard" c is a c that represents /k/; a "soft" c represents /s/. "Hard" g represents /ɡ/; "soft" g represents /ʤ/. So does "hard" mean 'velar' and "soft" mean 'coronal'? Does "hard" mean 'stop' and "soft" mean 'fricative or affricate'? Either way, I'd be much more inclined to call the c that represents /ʧ/ in cello "soft" rather than "hard." (Of course, I'm also influenced by the use of "hard" and "soft" in Slavic languages, where "soft" pretty clearly means "palatal(ized).")
Anyway, I do agree with your larger point that the sequences that cross morpheme boundaries are kind of cheating. And the first one would have been okay if they had changed "is usually soft" to something less ambiguous, although even then, I'd wonder whether they would have accepted "What is a dvojnice?" as a correct question....
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