Should I use the clue by four?

[pecunium]

In a conversation on the way things are pronounced someone argued that the terminal 'x' in french plurals is silent.

I, from my (at this point ancient) french made the observation:


> It isn't silent in French. It slightly clips the end, when it is the
> terminal word, and it elides into a 'z' sound when it abuts a vowel, a la
> "les bureaux acadamique" (which is probably crappy grammar, but shows the
> function).


Their reply was:

True enough, but on its own, it's silent:)

I am going to leave it lie there (though someone else did note that "silent e" (the genesis of the discussion) is, by my way of thinking, not really silent either.

Comments

[pecunium.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the little bits and pieces of various neepery. I have too many bits and pieces of language (I speak, with various levels of fluency, four. I can also hold my own in several distinct dialects of my mother tongue), and a touch of the pedant.

The guttering of the ending is a good way to describe it.

I suppose, though I'm not going to bring it up there, my real problem is that, even in English, with all it's oddity of spelling, most letters have real meaning to the pronunciation. It's why they were put on the page.

Some have atrophied, some are so different they are thought to be gone (the "lost 'r'" in Boston) but they do have function.

TK

[editrx.livejournal.com]

The "r" in Boston comes from the r's in "Martha's Vineyard" that were transferred over (Mahtha's Vinyahd). People think r's are missing in New England. They just don't know were to look. We save everything -- margarine containers, old jars -- why would we throw away perfectly good consonants?!

:-)