Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2020 September 19

= September 19 =

Consonant digraphs
How many English words are there that start with 2 consonants; the first is not S and the second is not L, R, H, or W; that don't simply make the second consonant alone pronounced?? (In most English words that meet this criterion, the second consonant alone is pronounced.) Georgia guy (talk) 14:20, 19 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Excluding proper nouns, which would give you lots of names such as McDonald (though the Mc there is an abbreviation of Mac), the only ones I can find are loan-words: fjord and (depending on pronunciation) tsar and its derivatives. AndrewWTaylor (talk) 15:13, 19 September 2020 (UTC)


 * Disregarding the pronunciation constraint I count about 1900 words (excluding proper nouns), after discarding initialisms like DNAS and things like Xmas and XLVIII, using a word list that is almost certainly not complete. But you may not want to count cnidaria and cnidarian separately. Most of the words I don't recognize; they are mostly scientific terms for things I haven't heard of and know nothing about. Since the list is for spell checking, it has no info on pronunciation, but some random checking gives very few hits where the first consonant is pronounced in a standard pronunciation (next to possibly a second standard pronunciation in which it is silent). This includes several words starting with cz, ts or tz (like czar), the word gmina, a few words starting with kv (with kvetch probably the best known), and the words tjaele and tlayuda. It is unclear how csardas should be classified, but is commonly not pronounced as if it was spelled sardas. I estimate the number of words on the list fitting the profile to be between 150 and 200.  --Lambiam 19:55, 19 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Also tsunami (if you pronounce it properly). Alansplodge (talk) 20:01, 19 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Lambiam, tlayuda doesn't count because the second letter cannot be L. Georgia guy (talk) 20:02, 19 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Tchoukball.-- Jayron 32 21:03, 19 September 2020 (UTC)
 * I did not include the onset tch because this is pronounced the same as the ch in chair, so you can consider the t to be silent. --Lambiam 17:19, 20 September 2020 (UTC)
 * Tmesis. --174.89.48.182 (talk) 00:15, 20 September 2020 (UTC)


 * See Sonority Sequencing Principle. --Amble (talk) 15:54, 21 September 2020 (UTC)