Was "Dip-thong" but now I'm hijacking it!

[Alice Faber]

>At 7:31 PM +0100 5/19/00, Aaron E. Drews wrote:
>
> >
> >"phth" is never found at the beginning of a word in English, so the "ph" go
> >to the vowel on its left.  Why "phth" become "pth" is something else.
> >
>One of my favorite dictionary words has always been "phthisis", which,
>although it actually refers to pulmonary tuberculosis, is the way I used to
>think of my dissertation before it managed to get written.  Unfortunately,
>the initial ph- (and not just the -h- part!) is evidently silent; M-W NCD7
>gives [THAY-s at s] (rhyming with 'crisis') as the only pronunciation.  I've
>never heard it pronounced myself, so I felt justified in thinking of it as
>[FTHI:s at s].

For what it's worth, I've always (or, at least, for as long as I've
known the word) thought of "phthisis" as starting with a /f-th/
cluster and containing two instances of the vowel in HIT.

On the other hand, that could be a spelling pronunciation on my part.
I was one of those hyperliterate kids with a large vocabulary
acquired through reading. I was almost through high school by the
time I realized that "infrared" has three syllables; I even knew that
it was in some sense the opposite of "ultraviolet", but I still
thought it rhymed with "cared".

Alice

Alice Faber, Manager                                         (860) 685-2954
Infant Language Development Laboratory                  afaber at wesleyan.edu
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Middletown, CT 06459                             faber at pop.haskins.yale.edu