[Wikipedia-l] Re: An idea

[Jimmy Wales]

Timwi wrote:
> And here I am trying very hard to understand how someone can think that
> a word that is pronounced the way "renowned" is, can possibly have a k
> in it.  It is not even pronounced anything like "know" or "knowledge".
> Furthermore, as "gnostic" versus "agnostic" clearly teaches us, letters
> do not tend to become silent when there is a prefix before them.

Here is the best way to understand it: English spelling and
pronunciation are highly irregular.  When a person is "world renowned"
then they are _known_ around the world.

Since "know" and "knowledge" have a silent 'k', then adding a prefix
would not _make_ the k silent, it would merely _leave_ the k silent.
The fact that "know" and "knowledge" sound different from "renowned"
isn't really helpful, since they sound different from _each other_, and
it is quite common for variants of English words to be pronounced
differently for no apparent reason.

A German and I once had a very confusing conversation at a restaurant in
Austria surrounding the word "dough".  A certain item on the menu was a
piece of meat surrounded by duff, apparently.  Hmm?  What's that?
Interesting food these Austrians eat.  Unfortunately, when I got the
meat and ate it it was tuff, and I had to coff.

My daughter recently asked Danny why the word 'receipt' has a 'p' in it.
 Well, he gave a decent answer but I think he made it up out of thin air.
That's the best that most of us can do, even very well educated and
smart people.

--Jimbo