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Why do we sometimes pronounce t as /t/, whereas other times we pronounce it as /ʧ/ or /ʃ/?

  • /t/ in town,
  • /ʧ/ in natural
  • /ʃ/ in hamartia/tertiary

Is there any special rule for these?

herisson
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zafor Ahmed
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    Note that pronunciation will usually evolve before a standardized spelling, so that the question might at least as well be posed why letter "t" was used in the accepted spelling of words with such pronunciations. – hardmath Feb 28 '14 at 13:05
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    These words all used to be pronounced with 't' sounds, and the spelling stayed the same when the sound changed. Certainly, "natural" didn't change to 'ʧ' until after the Great Vowel Shift turned 'u' into its modern pronunciation. The Wikipedia article I linked to says this was around 1700, a century after spelling was standardized. – Peter Shor Feb 28 '14 at 13:07
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    Related: Pronunciation of voiceless alveolar fricative /s/ as ʃ (/sh/) in slang, Why is “str” sometimes pronounced as “shtr”, and the questions linked from there. Or just check our palatalization tag. On a general note, as others have pointed out, it is not letters that are pronounced, but sounds that are spelled. And for spelling you have to consider not just sound, but also other things like etymology, disambiguation of homophones, etc. – RegDwigнt Feb 28 '14 at 13:26
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    Actually, these things can be quite complicated. For example, the OED says that "partial" was spelt with a "c" or an "s" in Middle English; the word came from Old French "parcial". So it presumably changed pronunciation from /t/ in Latin to /s/ in Old French. Middle English borrowed it from Old French with an /s/ sound, which changed to /ʃ/ in Modern English. When English spelling was fixed, the spelling was somehow changed to a "t" to match the Latin etymology (partialis). – Peter Shor Feb 28 '14 at 17:36
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    I certainly don’t pronounce the t in hamartia as /ʃ/ (to the extent that I pronounce the word at all, that is). It’s a regular ol’ /t/ sound to me. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Mar 06 '14 at 15:37

1 Answers1

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Its not about 't' precisely. Same is the case with c in cake, c in recess, c in chef or any other example of that kind.

1) It depends on the origin of the word. say, French or Latin (for example) 2) It depends on the letter that follows it ( This at times gives a combined effect on the word) 3) Also, spellings of some words change over time. This may be noted too !

Vani
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