SMBC Comics Forum

...How?

What other words that start with "ch" are pronounced with a hard "k"?

Choir?

Edit: Oh and School, stomach and echo!

Edit2: Darn I didn't read it properly either. Um... Christmas, Chaotic and Chronicle!

To name a few: Ache, Chasm, Schism, Chlamydia, Epoch, Inchoate, Chalcedony*, Synecdoche; if you cound loanwords, Loch, Lech Walesa, Charybdis, and Reichstag.

Oh! And Chitinous!

*Actually, I thought this one was pronounced with a "ch" sound until I checked just now.

Edit: Oh. You said "start with." that shaves the list down some. But it still leaves Chasm, Chlamydia, Chalcedony, Charybdis, Choir (Thanks, Cow!), and yours truly.

Oldrac the Chitinous wrote:Wait, Spanish? I thought Hamas was from Palestine. (Hyuk, hyuk.)

For a long time, I thought Chocobo (yeah, the Final Fantasy birds) was pronounced like "kokobo." I still think it sounds better that way.

Cocoa-bow? Cock-a-boo? Cock-oboe? I'm not really sure how you were pronouncing it.
I always pronounced it Choke-a-bow.

Also, I wouldn't really count the loan words, Oldrac. The -ch in Loch, isn't really a "k" sound. Or it is, only when you really Americanize it (same goes with several of your other examples, I'd imagine).
Also, "choir" is a bit of an anomaly in this respect. It is more of a "q".

Hrm. I've never really thought of how to textually render the ending of 'loch'. Kind of a 'kgh' sound, maybe?

I always thought the ch in loch was pronounced like the German ch, where you made a sort of k sound but you kept the sound going. I could be wrong though.

Lethal Interjection wrote:Cocoa-bow? Cock-a-boo? Cock-oboe? I'm not really sure how you were pronouncing it.
I always pronounced it Choke-a-bow.

Also, I wouldn't really count the loan words, Oldrac. The -ch in Loch, isn't really a "k" sound. Or it is, only when you really Americanize it (same goes with several of your other examples, I'd imagine).
Also, "choir" is a bit of an anomaly in this respect. It is more of a "q".

Like "Cocoa Bow". I did have a friend who pronounced it "Choo koo boo," though.
I was on the fence about including the loanwords, too. In the end, I decided I would, because if I'm speaking English, I usually do say "Lock Lomond." I know better, but it's a lot easier than trying to switch languages mid-sentence.

Thanks for the examples. I guess when you need to think of words, that's when you forget them.

Whenever I pronounce loanwords I always "pronounce" them in English, except for some Quebec pronunciations that are pretty well preserved around Toronto (if you can understand what I mean, I'm thinking nasal vowels, which are not really an English thing except where regressively assimilated). I find it in poor taste to adapt a word into English without rendering it pronounceable to English speakers.

ex. I can pronounce Spanish jalapeño like /xalapeɲo/ but in English I will always say /hæləpenjo/ because /x/ and /ɲ/ are not used in English. That is, I pronounce it like "ny" in "canyon"; even though that's not technically how it is pronounced in Spanish. Then again, they sound so similar I can't even tell the difference.

I've always pronounced "chocobo" with the "ch ch chair" sound, and long O. I don't really know where I picked it up from.

Loch is pronounced with the German "ch", which is present in Scots and Scots English. But no one pronounces it like that over here.

I learnt that if it weren't for the English language and people like LR, who refuse to preserve the traditional pronunciation, 'an orange' would still be pronounced 'a naa-run' (which funnily enough the name given to it in my native tongue). It's amazing how much the english language twists and corrupts loan words because of our alphabetic limitations.

Sahan wrote:I learnt that if it weren't for the English language and people like LR, who refuse to preserve the traditional pronunciation, 'an orange' would still be pronounced 'a naa-run' (which funnily enough the name given to it in my native tongue). It's amazing how much the english language twists and corrupts loan words because of our alphabetic limitations.

That explains why it's called a naranja.

That's not an English thing, it's actually pretty common. English is best known for it because of its high number of loanwords, most of which comes from French, due to historical reasons. I wouldn't call it "corruption", because it's guaranteed to happen. 'Fact "naa-run" (whatever language that's from) wouldn't be the original pronunciation, which comes from the Sanskrit नारङ्ग or "nāraṅga", which would probably be something like [naaraŋa] (I've been trying to memorise some Sanskrit script and phonology but I've been busy). Velar sounds like "ng" or "g" are pretty frequently palatalised and pushed forward in the mouth, which leads to the soft g's and c's.

Wait, so "Orange" was a word for the fruit before it was a word for the color? You are blowing my mind here.
So what did they call orange things before the fruit got introduced to English-speaking climes?

Oldrac the Chitinous wrote:Wait, so "Orange" was a word for the fruit before it was a word for the color? You are blowing my mind here.
So what did they call orange things before the fruit got introduced to English-speaking climes?

They probably didn't make the distinction yet, and called it red.

LordRetard wrote: 'Fact "naa-run" (whatever language that's from) wouldn't be the original pronunciation, which comes from the Sanskrit नारङ्ग or "nāraṅga", which would probably be something like [naaraŋa] (I've been trying to memorise some Sanskrit script and phonology but I've been busy).

Yeah, that sounds about right. Now that I thnk about it, the pronunciation I gave is more colloqiual and the official pronunciation is indeed naranga with weird symbols.

But from what I know, the Spanish discovered it in India, who possibly modified the word slightly too, and named it naranj with the y sound for the j). English people didn't know about the silent j and obviously must have started pronouncing it, because the word changed to narange. Over time 'a narange' became 'an arange' and then 'an orange'. There's all my entymology knowledge right there.