Cee and Gee: The Consonantal Ambinyms and the Digraph Combination plus
摘要
No two consonant letters are as challenging as Cee and Gee. In cancer and g̲ig̲antic, it’s clear their values are variable. It’s also clear that, at least in these two words, and spell the velar stop consonants /k/ and /g/ before but not or . Moreover, this stop consonant pattern extends to the pronunciation of in cot and cut and in g̲ot and g̲ut. However, in g̲et and g̲ive, represents /g/; in g̲enre it represents /ʒ/. And if this alphabetic charade were not enough, the digraph formed by the letters Cee and Aitch creates an interpretive challenge of its own. Even ignoring words like Chanukah and Bach, its value still vacillates across three voiceless consonants in chaos, challenge and charade itself. What’s more, the phonetics of this trio runs parallel to the three voiced consonants heard across g̲ynecology, g̲ene and g̲enre. While no panacea, a deeper understanding of the patterns surrounding the letters Cee and Gee can help bring order to the complex phonologistics of /k/ and /g/, their relation to a parallel series of speech sounds, their spellings and even the odd verb-noun alternation found in pairs like bake-batch and hang̲-hing̲e.