In the second part of our look at the sound of English in the early 1600s, we continue to explore the letters of the alphabet and the sounds that each letter represents. We explore the letters K through Z and examine how the sounds represented by those letters have evolved over the Modern English period.
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Very detailed and meticulous. Thank you for a superb episode. I understand your comment that “p” is pretty straightforward. However, a review of how “p” became “ph” for the “f” sound would have been interesting.
Thank you for a captivating podcast.
It was discussed as part of letter F in the last episode. Also check out Episodes 4 and 153 for a detailed discussion about how the Greek letter phi evolved into the modern ‘ph’ spelling for the ‘f’ sound.
I’m pretty sure you’ll get to it later … but I’m curious as to how Canadians came to have their special pronunciation of “ou”, as in house, mouse, etc. Hearing that is often how I can tell if a person is Canadian!
I’ve noticed the same phenomenon with some Irish people. It’s like they’re saying “hoyse” instead of the more common “howse”. I’ve often wondered if there’s some connection there with the Canadian bit you mentioned.
Hi Tom. That Canadian pronunciation was discussed in some detail in Episode 143, which was the third episode in the Great Vowel Shift series. I will definitely address it again in a future episode about Canadian English.
Hi Kevin, I listened again to that discussion about Canadian pronunciation in episode 143, as I was reminded of it just this week.
I live in France, and on the national breakfast TV show they were discussing Burn-out. They were using the English word. But they all pronounced both vowels in ‘out’ separately. The ‘o’ was short and the ‘u’ was pronounced like they do in ‘tu’ (you), where the lips are formed into a much tighter circle than we do for any English vowel sound.
The result was very reminiscent of Canadian pronunciation. As you mentioned in ep. 143 that the region around Quebec is more likely to have examples of that pronunciation, I wonder if the French language might have had more influence on the vowel sound than Scottish or Irish.
No doot aboot it!
Hi Kevin,
Also waiting for the transcript of this episode.
(English is not my first language, and I read the transcripts which you post to understand the podcast better.)
The transcript is there now.
Did I miss a letter between v and x, apart from “u” making its sound in some situations? Wondering hwat you would say about the spellings of “where” and “who”.
The ‘wh’ spelling in words like “where” and “who” is discussed at the end of Episode 161. Some of those specific topics were omitted from this episode due to time limitations and the fact that I covered them in some detail in earlier episodes.
On the subject of the initial k- sound in words like knife, knight and knot, I recommend Anatoly Liberman’s article “An Etymological Knockout”: https://blog.oup.com/2025/07/an-etymological-knockout/
Yay! Another episode! I have been listening to thus podcast religiously since 2023, when my dad put me onto it. I eagerly anticipate this hour of peace and learning in a world of chaos and stupidity. Thank you, Kevin. You’re a hero
Hi Kevin I totally agree with Yulia. A friend suggested i listen to You, and since Nov2022 I have eagerly listened to your episodes. Thanks for all that you do to put this together and keep it so interesting and enlightening; it is greatly appreciated.
A detailed account of a long and complicated story – thank you very much for this. How different the story of English spelling is from the top down approach to spelling you find in the French or German speaking worlds.