Why is the S in island not pronounced?

2 Answers. Island was long written with different spellings which didn’t include ‘s’, so it has presumably always been pronounced without /s/. (The derivation is not from Latin insula but from various Germanic forms, which also had no ‘s’.) According to Wikipedia, island comes from Middle English iland.

Is it pronounced dayta or data?

‘Data’ is pronounced: day-taa, not daa-taa. It is the plural of ‘datum’ (day-tum). Most dictionaries you refer would tell you this.

Why English is called non-phonetic language?

A phoneme is the smallest unit of sound that can change the meaning of a word. This, consequently, makes English a non-phonetic language, which means that the pronunciation of a word is not dependent on its spelling.

When a word is spelled the same but pronounced different?

Homophones
Homophones are words that sound the same but are different in meaning or spelling. Homographs are spelled the same, but differ in meaning or pronunciation. Homonyms can be either or even both.

Why is the spelling of pronounce and pronunciation different?

Why is the spelling of pronounceand pronunciationdifferent? If one originally did not know the spelling of pronunciation, one would when hearing it verbally deduce its spelling to be pronounciation, which is the incorrect spelling. Why is the difference in spelling so?

Why is English spelling and pronounciation so difficult?

English spelling and pronounciation is difficult. Many rules, and exceptions to the rules. As mentioned above some of it has to do with the fact that we have adopted and assimilated words from many languages. Many times keeping the rules from the old languages.

What are some words that are not pronounced clearly?

Some words are not pronounced clearly in everyday speech. For example, most Americans pronounce the word button as butn. The vowel sound in the unaccented syllable gets lost in the normal rhythm of speech, something that is particularly noticeable in words like different ( difrent ), separate ( seprit ), and jewelry ( jewlry ).

Why does the word pronounce have an O between the N’s?

(source) As for whythe word pronouncehas an O between the two N’s and pronunciationdoes not, it is unclear, but both words derive from French, pronunciationfrom pronunciationand pronouncefrom pronuncier. There is probably some variation in the way the different word stress affected how the words were spelled after being borrowed into English.