Jj is for Jottings 59. More Minimal Pairs: Voiced vs. Voiceless.
I was reminded a couple of days ago that there is more to say on the subject of minimal pairs ( see Jj is for Jottings 47. Minimal Pairs: Voiced vs. Voiceless. You may wish to read/re-read this before continuing), when an intelligent, well-educated adult fell into a common trap – thinking that the letter s (frequently a plural at the end of a word, but sometimes in the middle) is always pronounced as /s/, whereas in fact it is often pronounced as /z/. (Remember that the slashes (/ /) mark the fact that we are talking about a sound, as opposed to a letter name. This is explained in more detail in the introduction to “Aa is for Alpacas “.) But the plot thickens… Most voiced consonant sounds on the ends of words are actually devoiced , which means they end up sort of halfway between being voiced and unvoiced. I’ll deal with that separately in the next article.
So – when is s pronounced as /z/? It’s quite easy, really. When the sound before s is voiced – either a vowel or a voiced consonant – the resultant sound is /z/. If the sound before s is voiceless, it is pronounced /s/. Jottings 47 has a list of voiced and voiceless sounds. Some examples:
- Preceding sound is voiced, then s is /z/ – dogs, beds, boys, boxes, presents, easy.
- Preceding sound is voiceless, then s is pronounced /s/ – hops, cats, socks.
- When the s is preceded by a consonant – and therefore should be voiced – doubling the s keeps it as /s/ eg. princess, lesson.
Remember that this is the English language and there are usually exceptions.
Young readers (but not beginners) need to be aware of this so that they can make allowances when sounding out words – that s might actually be pronounced /z/ – and when spelling words that they don’t automatically know, and therefore need to write down the word sound by sound.
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