1. What are some terms that relate to this phenomenon? I want to beware of similar cases.
2. What are the reasons?
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3It's not a suffix in either word. The base verbs are lege and nege, the former from Old French (ultimately from Latin litigāre), the latter straight from Latin nēgāre. They're completely unrelated to each other, and the fact that they happen to contain the same three letters in their English form is just happenstance. – Janus Bahs Jacquet Nov 02 '14 at 10:54
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@JanusBahsJacquet Would you like to recast your comment as an answer, for which I’ll happily upvote? – Nov 02 '14 at 11:00
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The real reason they're pronounced differently is that one came from Old French, after the pronunciation of 'g' softened, and the other came straight from Latin, so its 'g' is still hard. – Peter Shor Dec 02 '14 at 14:47
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@PeterShor, "renege" is the only example I'm aware of of an English word of Latin origin that doesn't follow the soft g pronunciation rule. Are there others? – Sam Kauffman Aug 25 '15 at 22:25
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How about gibbous? – Peter Shor Aug 25 '15 at 22:56
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Highly related: Why is “renege” pronounced with a hard “g” sound? – herisson Aug 21 '16 at 04:40
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I merely replicate Janus Bahs Jacquet's comment above:
It's not a suffix in either word. The base verbs are lege and nege, the former from Old French (ultimately from Latin litigāre), the latter straight from Latin nēgāre. They're completely unrelated to each other, and the fact that they happen to contain the same three letters in their English form is just happenstance.
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4You probably should have allowed more than 5 minutes for him to post his own answer before you copied the comment yourself. – Barmar Nov 03 '14 at 21:24