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Someone asked a friend of mine to name three English words that are not compound and also have "ph" in them, pronounced with a hard 'p'. We were able to come up with "shepherd" and "haphazard." Does anyone know of a third? Maybe there are only two, and it was a mean puzzle... or maybe there are a lot, and we just can't think of them.
Yep. I understood the condition. You're welcome.
I suggest you be equally tricky and say you found at least 16. Challenge him or her to find them.
upholster, upholstery, upholsteries, upholsterer, upholsterers, upholstering, upholstered, upholsters, shepherd, shepherdess, shepherding, shepherded, shepherds, shepherdesses, haphazard, haphazardly
I see no rule about inflected forms.
Why not throw in PhD as an answer. If he or she balks, ask them to pronounce it without a hard p. And it most certainly is NOT a compound.
So. Just for fun, no tricky limitations (shepherd could theoretically be considered a compound when you consider the etymology, as could upholstery), let's just come up with words containing ph, sh, th, ch where they are not pronounced as the common digraph.
Hiphop
chimera
mishap
pothead or $#!+head
and lots of others. Any favorites?
In words like "haphazard" and "shepherd," there is no "ph" digraph as the "p" and the "h" occur in separate morphemes. Their juxtaposition in such a case is coincidental.
Most English speakers show a strong instinct to reduce successive digraphs to the phoneme suggested by the first letter of the pair. This results in "ph" commonly being pronounced as "p" in certain words of Greek origin where the digraph "th" closely or immediately follows the "ph." I would argue that these are really just wide-spread mispronunciations, but phoneticists of a more descriptive bent might disagree: "amphitheater" vs. "ampitheater," "ophthalmologist" vs. "opthalmologist," "diphtheria" vs. "diptheria," etc.
lux rationis said:
Most English speakers show a strong instinct to reduce successive digraphs to the phoneme suggested by the first letter of the pair. This results in "ph" commonly being pronounced as "p" in certain words of Greek origin where the digraph "th" closely or immediately follows the "ph." I would argue that these are really just wide-spread mispronunciations, but phoneticists of a more descriptive bent might disagree: "amphitheater" vs. "ampitheater," "ophthalmologist" vs. "opthalmologist," "diphtheria" vs. "diptheria," etc.
This is a great point. I've even heard some pronounce ophthalmologist as /aptəmɑlədʒɪst/, reducing both the -ph- and the -th- to -pt-, although I suspect also a strong association with the optic prefix.
Glenn said: I've even heard some pronounce ophthalmologist as /aptəmɑlədʒɪst/, reducing both the -ph- and the -th- to -pt-, although I suspect also a strong association with the optic prefix.
And considering how Φ and Θ were pronounced in Classical Greek (before 300 B.C.E.), this kind or pronunciation seems eerily reconstructionist. Our love of retaining redundant spellings for the same phonemes in English leads to this need to dissimilate. Since "ph" and "th" are both fricatives in Modern English, most people want to change one — or both — to something that provides for greater aural contrast (in this case, bilabial and dental plosives, which ends up being closer to the original Greek).
This kind of phonemic dissimilation is hard-wired into the development of many other languages. Those such as Spanish that simply romanized Greek phonemes made it easy for the speaker: anfiteatro, oftalmólogo, difteria.
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