The J is a newcomer to the English alphabet. It looks like an I with a curly tail, which is appropriate because it was originally just an I, and it was pronounced rather like the consonant Y (yes, you, yoyo.)  When you sing Halleluja or Alleluia or Halleluyah you give it a consonant Y sound.
 
Neither the Romans nor the Greeks had the J and it was not in either the Aramaic or the Hebrew alphabet. It appears to have appeared sometime in the 16th Century.
 
Today the J with its special sound is firmly established in the English language but, interestingly, it is never used as the final letter in English words. That is, if we don’t count the Arabic Hajj, the Persian Taj, and the Hindi Raj.
 
The problem with the J is that it shares the same sound as the G. The spelling rule is. “Whenever a single G is followed by A, O, or U, it has the hard sound. Examples are, gap, game, got, gossip, gum, gutter. Whenever a single G is followed by the letters E, Y, or I, it has the soft J sound. Examples are, general, geology, ginger, giant, energy, astrology, gypsy.‘
 
The vast majority of words containing the G obey this rule. Unfortunately there are nearly forty commonly used words that break the rule. Examples are, get, target, finger, gift, give, begin. There is no way around the problem so the English student, both domestic and foreign, just has to learn and memorize these exceptions.

With the Middle East so much in the news these days, it is interesting to see just how many English words came to us from Arabic.
 
If you have studied mathematics and science, you already know that many of those al words such as algebra, algorithm, alchemy, alcohol, and alkali are from Arabic. So are sine, zenith, nadir, zero, elixir, borax, and antimony.
 
When it comes to food and plants, we would be quite lost without sugar, syrup, albacore, alfalfa, apricot, artichoke, attar, candy, caraway, carob, coffee, lemon, lime, marzipan, orange, saffron, sherbet, sumac, tamarind, tarragon, and even spinach. All of these are words borrowed from or based on Arabic.
 
There are about two hundred English words that have Arabic roots. They range from the game of chess to types of cloth, including calico, cotton, mohair, muslin, satin, and even sequins. The variety of these borrowed words is surprising. They range from the names of famous stars (Betelgeuse and Deneb) to everyday items (mattress, magazine, sofa) to some animals (gerbil, gazelle, giraffe).
 
Few of these words came directly from the Arabic, however. Many of them hopscotched from place to place over the centuries until they arrived in France, whence they made their way to England. The French probably borrowed the words from Spain, which was part of the Arabic-speaking world for seven hundred years. The Arabs borrowed many words from the Persians (who speak Farsi) or India or China. This word transfer often took many years, sometimes centuries, and sometimes went as far back as the Greeks and Romans. For example, the Arabic word alchemy has Greek roots.
 
While some countries resist the invasions of foreign words in a loosing battle to keep their language “pure,” the English-speaking nations have always welcomed new words…as long as they’re useful. Today, we anglophones probably use two or three Arabic words every day.

Of course they do. And they even use the same word that we use.  “I eat my lunch” is Ik eet mijn lunch in Dutch. Why do I ask such a peculiar question? Because it illustrates a peculiar spelling rule. When do we end a word with TCH and when do we end a word with just CH?
 
The spelling rule (see chapter 21 of the Guide) states that if the CH is preceded by a short stressed vowel, it uses the TCH. (catch, ditch, Dutch). If the sound is preceded by a consonant or a long vowel, it must use the CH. (branch, each, lunch). It is a simple rule. Easy to learn and easy to understand and there are barely a dozen exceptions. For example, rich, much and detach.
 
The big question is why do we have this rule? Whether or not the word contains a T seems to make no difference to the sound of the word. The T does not make the preceding vowel short or long. Compare filch and fitch, wrench and wretch, or crunch and crutch. That T doesn’t seem to do anything to the vowel sound.
 
Would it make any difference if ketchup were spelled kechup? Or if kitchen were spelled kichen? Would it matter if butcher were spelled bucher? Not really.
 
Perhaps the rule appeared at a time when words that use the CH in various unusual ways were slipping into the English language. Words like chef, chute, chorus, choir, chaos, machine, school, stomach, echo, lichen. 
 
When and why this spelling rule appeared I do not know. What is much more interesting is the way the rule is fully accepted by scholars and students alike. There is general agreement that it is a logical rule and there are very few exceptions yet, when we look at it carefully, we see that there is no good reason for it to exist.

The odd title of this blog illustrates something that for most people is just another annoying spelling problem. Some words end in C, some words end in CK, and others end in K. But the variety of endings is not an anomaly. It’s a spelling rule.
 
Unlike many other languages, English has a variety of vowel sounds, so there have to be signals to guide the reader. One example is the silent E (hat, hate). Another is the double consonant (diner, dinner). The C, CK, K rule is a variation of the double consonant rule.
 
Only a tiny handful of  English word have a double K, and these are usually compounds like jackknife. There are many words with a double C, but the C’s usually have different sounds, as in accident, occidental, eccentric, and vaccine.
 
Then there are words that have a double C that is really not necessary. These include exotic imports like stucco, yucca, toccata, and tobacco, plus more common words like succor, occur, occupy, accuse, and accountable. Fortunately there are not many of these.
 
The rule for short, single syllable words is quite simple. After a short vowel, use CK (back). After a long vowel or a consonant, use K (bank). If the word has more than one syllable and ends in the K sound, we usually spell it with a C (public, maniac, domestic).
 
Mixed in with the long vowel words that end in the K sound (book, week, soak) are plenty of easily recognized exotic imports such as kayak, Sputnik, beatnik, kapok, and mukluk. 

Almost everybody can recite this rhyming spelling rule, and almost everybody has ridiculed it as worthless because of the numerous exceptions to it. Let’s look at the exceptions.
 
This spelling rule applies only to words where the two letters form a diphthong, which is the sound of two vowels combined in a single syllable, like the AE in Caesar. The word science does not contain a diphthong; the I and the E are separate sounds in separate syllables. Nor does society contain a diphthong, nor do deity or quiet. We can, however, see the diphthong in hieroglyphics.
 
The I before E rule does not apply to plurals like vacancies, nor does it apply to comparatives and superlatives like jucier and juiciest. Which leaves fewer than a dozen anomalies, such as ancient and glacier. Even these few exceptions are subject to argument, however, depending on how the words are pronounced. Here’s the rest of the I before E rhyme:
 
I before E, except after C.
Or when sounding like ay in neighbor and weigh
Or when sounding like eye in seismic and height.
 
Read that little rhyme over again, and you will clearly see that the rule applies only to words that have the ee sound. It does not apply to words with the ay sound: eight, deign, vein, sleigh. Nor does it apply to words that have the eye sound: feisty, eidetic, sleight, einsteinium.
 
The problem comes when we have words with different sounds: sieve, friend, view, patient, efficient. These words usually follow the I before E rule.
 
The rule is also a guide to pronunciation. You may pronounce either any way you wish (ee-ther or eye-ther), but notice that it does fall into the eye group of words like eiderdown and Eiffel Tower. As for geisha and sheik, they both have the ay sound.
 

There are many people who believe that English spelling has no rules, that it’s just a mish-mash with a few general guidelines. This is not true. There are many rules that we use every day without actually realizing that they are rules.
 
But, yes, there are exceptions to many of the rules, although when we consider the enormous number of words in the English language and the diverse origins of the words, it is astonishing that there are so few exceptions.
 
Some rules have only a tiny handful of exceptions. One rule has no exceptions. This rule states that the letter Q must always be followed by a U and a vowel. English has more than 2,500 words that use the Q and follow the rule that says the word should begin QU…. No commonly used English word breaks this rule.
 
Words that seem to break the rule are loan words or translations from another alphabet, such as Arabic or Pinyin Chinese. One or two words may come from Hebrew or the Inuit language. Words and names that come from the Arabic, Iraq, Quran, Aqaba, are usually easy for us to recognize and pronounce. The sounds of the words and their beginning consonants in Arabic are quite different. For example, kalb means “dog,” but qalb means “heart.”
 
Similarly, The Q in Pinyin Chinese looks like it should be pronounced K. But the consonants in Chinese are also quite different. For example the port of Qingdao is also known as Tsingtao.
 
There appear to be a few modern exceptions to the QU rule, but they’re usually invented words or acronyms. The company name Compaq was invented. . The stock market name Nasdaq is an acronym for National Association of Securities Dealers Automated Quotations System, where the Q stands for “quotations.” The airline name Quantas is an acronym in which the Q refers to Queensland. And Qwerty is simply a line of left-hand letters on a keyboard.
 

The double consonant has only one purpose. It is there to warn the reader that the preceding vowel is a short one and that the accent, or stress, is on that vowel.  The best example is dine, dinner. Without that doubled consonant, N, we would have diner, in which the vowel I has a long sound and has a different meaning. The diner is the person who eats the dinner. Another example is hop, hopping. Without the double consonant, P, we would have hoping, which is the progressive form of the verb hope. For example: I hope, or I am hoping…that I will someday see a hopping rabbit. (Got that?) 
 
This rule, or guideline, was very useful in the days when most adults were barely literate, and it is still a useful guide for words that end in the silent E. For example, fate and fat. Is it fated or fatted? Was the “fatted calf” in the Book of Luke fated to be eaten? If you go off your diet, do you get fater or fatter? How about cut and cute? Do we write, “She is cuter” or “she is cutter”? Do we tell someone to “use the paper cuter” or “use the paper cutter”?
 
Unfortunately, many ancient scribes, typesetters, and dictionary makers too often either used a double consonant where it was not needed or failed to double the consonant when it was needed. As a result, today the number of words that break the rule is about equal to the number that follow the rule. This is a ridiculous problem for you and me and especially for students.
 
Take the word necessary. Does that double S follow the stressed vowel? No, it doesn’t.
 
How about these words? Paraffin. Accuse. Illusion. Immediate. Connect. Surrender. Assist. Attract. English gives us hundreds more words like these that seem not to follow any rule.
 
So what can be done about it? Since there is no absolute law that covers English spelling and no academy or committee (note the two double consonants) that govern English spelling, do not hesitate to drop an obviously unnecesary consonant when you are writing informally (as I just dropped the superfluous S). But do this only in very informal writing or maybe when you are texting. And be sure to keep your dictionary handy when you are writing something important, such as a term paper or an aplication (application) for a job!

If you are not clear about the difference between “lay” and “lie,” it’s helpful to remember that “chickens lay, people lie.” 
 
Let me explain. First, there is no confusion when you mean to say something that is not true,” such as “he told a lie.” So forget about that.
 
When chickens lay their eggs, they place something somewhere. “They will lay their eggs in the boxes.” So when we place something in a position, usually horizontally, we lay it. For example, “we lay the table.” “The soldiers laid down their arms.” “We will lay the body in the coffin.” “Please lay a drop cloth on the floor before you paint.” “Lay” is what’s called a transitive verb where the subject of the sentence does something (the action of the verb) to an object. For example, “I’m going to lay the baby on the blanket”
 
Lie is what’s called an intransitive verb. It doesn’t take a direct object. “I’m going to lie down.” “The island lies in the middle of the lake.” “The baby lies quietly sleeping.” “Papa is lying in the hammock.” Confusion can come with the past tense: “The weapon lay on the floor”.
 
The confusion probably arises because these verbs share “lay.” “Lay” is the present tense of the transitive verb “lay” and is also the past tense of the intransitive verb “lie.” When in doubt ask yourself, “Lay what?” or “Lie where?”
 
Have fun.

When I was a small boy I wondered about the silent ‘d’ in wednesday. I thought it was one of those letters that well educated people pronounce. Rather like the ‘r’ in February. I could handle ‘feb-roo-ary’ quite well but could never manage ‘wed-nes-day’. I was told that it came from the German ‘Woden’s Day’ which matched up with “Thor’s Day’. That sounded right but when I spent a summer hitch hiking around Europe I found the Germans called them ‘Mittwoch’ and ‘Donnerstag’.

I have traveled widely in numerous English speaking countries and nowhere have I heard anybody pronounce that ‘d’. Today, countless millions of people all around the world are stuck with an extremely popular word that is disfigured by a useless and often confusing silent letter.

I suggest we drop it. Wensday, instead of Wednesday would do no damage to our linguistic heritage or affect our literary past. It would not produce another homograph or homophone or even a heteronym. It would make the phonics people happy and it would be accepted immediately by almost everybody. It would also bring a sigh of relief from countless schoolboys and foreign students world wide.

The next time you have to write that day of the week, spell it wensday and see what happens. I’ll make a good guess that most people will not notice and the few that do will agree with you that wensday is more aesthetically pleasing than wednesday.