The Differing “ch” in “Spinach” and “Stomach”

Hi there, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, thank you. My name is Isabella. I’m calling from Dallas.

Welcome, Isabella. What can we do for you?

Well, my question is very simple, but it’s been haunting me forever.

I just want to know why spinach is pronounced spinach and why stomach is pronounced stomach.

So, like, why is the C-H sound different?

Why is spinach pronounced spinach and stomach pronounced stomach?

Yes, so the C-H sound.

Are you a native English speaker, first language speaker?

Oh, no, it’s my second language, so maybe that’s why I have a million questions about English.

What’s your first?

Spanish.

Spanish, okay.

Yeah, trust me, the English speakers also have a lot of questions about the language.

And one of them is, why doesn’t pronunciation match the spelling more?

And it has to do with these accidents of history that lead us to all these different places that English got its word.

And then hanging on to the old pronunciations and hanging on to the old spellings.

So spinach and stomach have different etymological roots.

That’s basically the story.

So spinach ultimately comes from Arabic and Persian words, espinach, something like that.

And then over time, that pronunciation got changed through French.

So you can blame the French, which really don’t do that hard C sound at the end of very many words.

There’s just a handful of words in French, like flick and freak and things like that.

So that hard C changed to the ch or sh in French.

Spanish keeps it, though. Espinaca, right?

Espinaca, yeah. Spanish keeps it.

And then similarly for stomach.

Stomach comes to us from Greek, basically means mouth of the gullet, something like that.

And so the stomacos.

And there’s a hard C sound.

And we kept that hard C sound from Latin into Old French, stomach.

Again, there’s the exception.

So it’s many French words.

They don’t do the hard C sound at the end words.

Sometimes they do.

And then it was borrowed into Middle English hundreds and hundreds of years ago.

And we just kept the pronunciation, even though the spelling changed a little bit over time.

That makes total sense.

Every word has its own story.

There’s no wholesale effort that really radically changed whole big groups of words all at once,

Except for something known as the great vowel shift,

When a lot of vowels in English kind of changed over a 150 to 300-year period.

Yeah, that’s awesome.

I bet you never had a spelling bee, right, in Spanish?

Oh, yeah.

We actually did have spelling bee in Spanish.

Really?

And my friends here were like, but that makes no sense.

You need to know your accent, I guess.

But there are dialects of Spanish where they leave out syllables

Or they leave off the terminating vowels, that sort of thing.

So that’s kind of English’s problem.

It borrowed from a variety of different dialects from French and English and other things.

And so there’s no one consistent central language which provided all of the roots for all of the words.

Yeah, that makes sense.

Thank you so much for answering my question.

It was our pleasure, Isabella.

Thanks for calling.

We’re glad to help.

Take care.

Okay, have a good one.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.