Why pronounce wednesday

Zairja Zairja 6, 6 6 gold badges 36 36 silver badges 78 78 bronze badges. Glaswegians I know -- and no one else -- pronounce the D in Wednesday. JAM Thanks. That led me to information about the Standard Scottish English pronunciations.

Feel free to make this an answer so I can accept it. And I believe many UK-based call centres use Scots because they tend to speak clearly perhaps because they wouldn't be so easily understood by us Sassenachs if they spoke more casually, and they need the jobs!

Show 6 more comments. Active Oldest Votes. Improve this answer. Suke Suke 1 1 bronze badge. It is followed immediately by a continuable sound, the "n", which is formed in the same part of the mouth, by touching the tongue to the alveolar ridge on the roof of the mouth just behind the front teeth. The d sound is made by popping the tongue off the alveolar ridge, while the n sound is formed by holding the tongue on the ridge and exhaling.

To do the first and the second consecutively requires too much up-and-down business with the tongue. Other sounds that can't be prolonged are p, b, t, k, and g. There's a fun fact! Now, you may have noticed that in the word Wednesday there is not one but two elisions. The second elision is the "e" between the n and the s. Many words in English lose a lightly spoken vowel between two consonants: "Every" is pronounced "evry.

This saves labor. We don't know this stuff off the top of our heads. Our indubitable source is Arthur Bronstein, a phonetician at the University of California at Berkeley and the author of the pronunciation essay in the Unabridged Random House Dictionary. The real question is whether there were ever any Phoenician phoneticians. Hold that thought. His logic was that the tapeworm, which sits in your guts and steals your food, should gain weight in proportion to the weight you lose, so that there would be no net change.

There is a certain logic to this, we must admit. While there's no moment that can pinpoint the fading away of Wednesday's "d" in spoken American English, and no reason why — though an oceanic divide seems to have spurred language's evolution — the erosion of a pronounced letter over time isn't all that uncommon.

Phonologically speaking, when that happens to a letter on the interior of a word, it's called syncope. You may be familiar with syncope as a poetic device — going "o'er" a river instead of "over. Chocolate has a central "o" that's not fully pronounced, and Christmas sounds more like a celebration of someone called Chris, though it celebrates a figure known as the Christ.

Sign up for our Newsletter! Mobile Newsletter banner close. Mobile Newsletter chat close. Mobile Newsletter chat dots. Mobile Newsletter chat avatar. Mobile Newsletter chat subscribe. English is linguistically categorized as a West Germanic language. Though it is now the most widely spoken language in the world, English actually got a pretty small start.

In the fifth century, many related Germanic dialects fused together, collectively becoming what is now known as Old English. These dialects were brought to the eastern coast of England by Germanic settlers and eventually gained a stronghold in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England in what is now southeast Scotland. Grammarly can save you from misspellings, grammatical and punctuation mistakes, and other writing issues on all your favorite websites. Old English eventually evolved into Middle English as a result of invasion and interaction.

Beginning in the eleventh century, English was increasingly influenced by the Romance languages, so-named because they descended from Latin, the language of the Romans.