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February 28

Initial F, R or S not pronounced /f/, /r/ or /s/ /s z ʃ/

Most letters can begin English words without their nominal values, but I can't find anything for F. There's also very little for S (a few German place names where it's /z/ or /ʃ/) or R (a few Polish place names in Rz- and obscure Tibetic words with a silent r- prefix). But especially F. Anyone know of anything? — kwami (talk) 19:52, 28 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

The word ship starts with an ⟨s⟩, but its pronunciation does not have an /s/. I think you knew this, but it fits a literal interpretation of this section's heading. :) --Lambiam 20:35, 28 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

(Written before Lambiam's note.) I have a hard time believing there'd be any words that would be particularly 'common'. In Irish and Scottish Gaelic, it seems that an initial fh-digraph is silent, but I have trouble finding any of these words that are particularly widely borrowed. Maybe some place name? 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 20:41, 28 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, I tried finding any that had been borrowed into English, and couldn't. Fh would normally only occur internally in a phrase, even in a place name, since it's due to consonant mutation. — kwami (talk) 20:59, 28 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Sugar for initial S not in a digraph. --Wrongfilter (talk) 20:46, 28 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, certainly "S is for Sugar" would be the most common unintuitive choice. (I was taking sh as an initial digraph with /ʃ/ as its normal value, so not an orthographic exception.) Also sjambok for the same, and e.g. 'sblood. Guess I should've said "beside the usual pronunciations of s(C) as /s z ʃ/." Plenty of silent esses later in a word, just not initially.

F is more difficult. A double F in place of a capital seems to be the only oddity, unless one of those Gaelic words somehow made it in in initial position. — kwami (talk) 20:58, 28 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Fe is sometimes pronounced 'iron'? -- Verbarson ^talk_edits 21:48, 28 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Hm, interesting. Maybe that would work as "F is for FeO (iron oxide)". Could have "W is for W04 (tungstate)" too if we went that route. But those aren't really orthographies for those words -- e.g. FeO could also be read as "wüstite", so they're symbols rather than the spellings of specific words. — kwami (talk) 22:17, 28 February 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Hey, I think this is a great example. It's pretty common in inorganic chem texts and papers to use chemical symbols instead of element names. Sometimes you even find "an Fe" (more examples), very strongly suggesting that it's meant to be read "iron". Double sharp (talk) 00:00, 1 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, thanks to both of you. "Fe-based" could only be read as "iron-based". If we had "A as in gold", "K as in potassium", "N as in sodium" etc., it would be too easy. But if it were just the one ... — kwami (talk) 00:09, 1 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

It would relevantly solve S as well (Sn as in tin, Sb as in antimony), but clearly F is the hardest. And I agree that if this joke is repeated, it stops being funny and starts being a too-easy cop-out indeed. So saving it for F seems best. Double sharp (talk) 00:13, 1 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I would read "Fe-based" as "Eff-Ee based". [For context, I studied Chemistry as an undergraduate.] {The poster formerly known as 87.81.230.195} 51.198.55.125 (talk) 00:27, 1 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I'd think it would be hard to understand if you read the example "An Fe-Ni-Cr embedded atom method" that way. But you're right: it's ambiguous, as these are not orthography. — kwami (talk) 00:36, 1 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Both readings "eff e" and "iron" are possible, but the papers I linked with the construction "an Fe" (emphasis mine) pretty strongly imply that the authors were intending that it be read as "iron". And as kwami points out, in something like "Fe-Ni-Cr" I'd indeed much rather read out the element names for clarity. Double sharp (talk) 00:36, 1 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

But "an" works with "eff-e" as well, so not decisive. We might be able to find papers like this at a conference where the titles are announced, but they still could potentially go either way. — kwami (talk) 00:41, 1 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Kwamikagami: That was quite a mental lapse on my part, indeed. :) Examples both ways for Ag ("a gee" vs "silver"): "an Ag" one, two ("an Ag polycrystal"), "a Ag" one ("Chemisorption of a Ag atom"), two. So I agree: it can go both ways. Double sharp (talk) 16:05, 1 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Fhtagn! is the title of a Nintendo game, so I guess that's English now. Only reads funny, though -- pronunciation is still /f/. — kwami (talk) 00:18, 1 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Ka-tool for school, I guess... 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 03:28, 1 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I'm pretty sure that Wakuran was pointing out that this is a reference to the HP Lovecraft Cthulhu literature, but you may not have understood the joke. Any claim that it has to being English LOOOOOONG predates that video game. --User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 05:46, 1 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Oh, yeah. Although it's R'lyehian, actually. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 14:12, 1 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Kwamikagami how about "F for Felinfoel" (being Welsh, the F is pronounced as /v/, including in English). I was trying to find an Irish word used in English with initial fh- (which is completely silent) but couldn't find one. – filelakeshoe (t / c) 🐱 09:23, 1 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. I can have v for /f/ and f for /v/!

Yeah, I doubt we're going to find initial Irish fh. — kwami (talk) 09:26, 1 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Well, v for /f/ is of course common in German (which also uses f for /f/), but I'm not sure on whether any of these German words have been widely borrowed. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 13:00, 2 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Volkssturm, Volkswagen and wikt:verboten#English are a few. 82.166.199.42 (talk) 13:14, 2 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Does F-bomb count?

List of Latin-script digraphs#F

⟨ff⟩ which may be written as the single unit: ﬀ, is used in English and Cornish[5] for the same sound as single ⟨f⟩, /f/. The doubling is used to indicate that the preceding vowel is (historically) short, or for etymological reasons, in latinisms. Very rarely, ⟨ff⟩ may be found word-initially in English, such as in proper names (e.g., Rose ffrench, Jasper Fforde). In Welsh, ⟨ff⟩ represents /f/, while ⟨f⟩ represents /v/. In Welsh, ⟨ff⟩ is considered a distinct letter, and placed between ⟨f⟩ and ⟨g⟩ in alphabetical order. In medieval Breton, vowel nasalisation was represented by a following ⟨ff⟩. This notation was reformed during the 18th century, though proper names retain the former convention, which leads to occasional mispronunciation. For ﬀ as a single unit see: Typographic ligature and Unicode FB00 (U+FB00) in Latin script in Unicode and Unicode equivalence

⟨fh⟩ is used in Irish and Scottish Gaelic for the lenition of ⟨f⟩. This happens to be silent, so that ⟨fh⟩ in Gaelic corresponds to no sound at all. For example, the Irish phrase cá fhad ('how long') is pronounced [kaː ˈad̪ˠ], where fhad is the lenited form of fad /fɑd/ ('long').

⟨fx⟩ in used in Nambikwara for a glottalized /ɸʔ/.

Maybe some Welsh or Irish proper name is pronounced by locals as in the original language? A beer brand?

List of Latin-script digraphs#S is not very fruitful.

List of Latin-script digraphs#R:

⟨rh⟩ [...] ⟨Rh⟩ is also found in Welsh where it represents a voiceless alveolar trill (r̥), that is a voiceless "r" sound. It can be found anywhere; the most common occurrence in English from Welsh is in the slightly respelled given name "Rhonda".

⟨rm⟩ is used in Inuktitut for /ɴm/.

⟨rs⟩ was equivalent to ⟨rz⟩ and stood for /r̝/ (modern ř) in medieval Czech. In Greenlandic, it represents /sː/ as the result of an assimilation of a consonant cluster with a uvular consonant as the first component. In Norwegian and Swedish, it represents voiceless retroflex fricative, [ʂ].

⟨rz⟩ is used in Polish and Kashubian for a voiced retroflex fricative /ʐ/, similar to English zh as in Zhivago. Examples from Polish are marzec (help·info) "March" and rzeka (help·info) "river". ⟨rz⟩ represents the same sound as ⟨ż⟩, but they have a different origin. ⟨rz⟩ used to be pronounced the same way as Czech ⟨ř⟩ (/r̝/) in older Polish, but the sounds merged, and the orthography still follows etymology. When preceded by a voiceless consonant (ch, k, p, t) or end of a word, ⟨rz⟩ devoices to [ʂ], as in przed (help·info) ("before", [ˈpʂɛt]).

--Error (talk) 13:08, 1 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

In Norwegian and Swedish [ʂ] is an assimilated form of [rs]. Although the sound [ʂ] might occur initially in certain dialects, orthographically it's never spelled with ⟨rs⟩. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 14:12, 1 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

By the way, there are a bunch of these "retroflex digraphs", including ⟨rd⟩, ⟨rl⟩, ⟨rn⟩ and ⟨rt⟩, except for ⟨rs⟩, although none are used initially. I think that in the word karl (man, bloke), ⟨rl⟩ might even be pronounced as a retroflex r, not really found anywhere else in Swedish. 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 22:32, 4 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

That <rC> convention is also used for retroflexes in Australian languages, and does occur initially, but AFAIK doesn't survive in loans into English, even in place names (at least in initial position). — kwami (talk) 00:40, 5 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

All good ideas. "Rhonda" is probably the best, even though it still begins with an 'r'. There are a number of Greek words beginning with rh-, such as "rhythm". The Polish towns beginning with Rz- are all rather obscure -- Rzeszów is the largest, and I'd never heard of it before. — kwami (talk) 21:45, 1 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

When my family visited Poland, I think we visited Rzeszów, or at least it was discussed, so I recognize it, personally... Anyway, a digression... 惑乱 Wakuran (talk) 23:46, 1 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

You're good. --Ouro (blah blah) 10:54, 2 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]