Wednesday - I've always remembered how to spell this by saying WED NES DAY or "WEDDING'S DAY", but it's primarily pronounced wenz day or wenz dee. I searched several references, and found only a small set of people who include the "wed" sound, saying "wednz day":
Pizza Most Americans pronounce it like "Pete's a good guy" or technically:
Some people might say pee zza because that's how it looks or their parents and friends said it or they think it sounds Italian (it doesn't).
When it comes to radio shows, announcers are trained to enunciate, over-pronounce, or stress words in special ways that emphasize clarity over absolute correctness; it might not even be precisely the correct pronunciation. So if you listen to radio announcers, you can sometimes hear non-typical pronunciations.
Information on pronunciation of minestrone has been moved here: How do you pronounce, "minestrone"?
𝑇𝐿;𝐷𝑅
'Wind' (n) and 'wind' (v) had the same vowel in Old English. Both had a short vowel /i/ which was lengthened in Late OE due to a sound change triggered by consonant clusters such as /nd, ld, mb, rd/ etc. The vowel in 'wind' (n) got shortened in the seventeenth century for some reasons. The short and long vowels in 'child' and 'children' can also be attributed to the same sound change.
𝐻𝑜𝑚𝑜𝑟𝑔𝑎𝑛𝑖𝑐 𝐿𝑒𝑛𝑔𝑡ℎ𝑒𝑛𝑖𝑛𝑔
By about the tenth century (Late Old English), there was a sound change called Homorganic Lengthening (HL) through which original short vowels were lengthened in certain words in the environment of a following voiced homorganic cluster. To be precise, before a cluster of Sonorant (Nasal or Liquid) + voiced homorganic obstruent.
Homorganic means having the same place of articulation, so vowels before clusters like /nd/, /ld/, /mb/, /rd/, /rn/, /ŋɡ/ etc., were lengthened in certain words. The change also applied to some clusters with /r/ as their first element such as /rd/, /rn/, /rl/, /rð/ (Donka Minkova) so the vowel in words like board, hoard, yearn, earl, earth etc., were also lengthened due to HL.
Examples
- A striking example of HL is the word 'climb':
Old English climban and would've been pronounced with a short vowel before HL: /ˈklim.bɑn/, it became: /ˈkliːm.bɑn/1
- 'Ground' was OE grund, pronounced /ɡrund/, it became /ɡruːnd/2
- 'Blind' was OE blind, pronounced /blind/, it became /bliːnd/
- 'Field' was OE feld, pronounced /feld/, it became /feːld/3
Influence of a third consonant
However, the lengthening didn't take place when the homorganic cluster in question was followed by a third consonant. It means HC+C ('HC' being the homorganic cluster and 'C' another consonant) cluster was impervious to HL. This can be illustrated by the following example:
- 'Hound' was OE hund and pronounced /xund/, it became /xuːnd/. 'Hundred', on the other hand, was hundred, pronounced /ˈxundred/, it didn't change because the homorganic cluster /nd/ was followed by a third consonant /r/.
The vowel in 'grind' is long due to HL and that of 'grindstone' (ModE: /ˈɡraɪn(d)stəʊn/) should've been short because the /nd/ is followed by a third consonant, but it isn't. Otto Jespersen says that 'grindstone' was formerly always /ˈgrinstən/ and the long vowel in ModE is by analogy with 'grind'.
This point also accounts for the long and short vowels in 'child' and 'children'.
Child vs children
- 'child' was OE ċild, pronounced /t͡ʃild/, it became /t͡ʃiːld/
- 'children' was OE ċildru, pronounced /t͡ʃildru/, it didn't undergo the sound change because the cluster /ldr/ was impervious to HL.
Don't let the w[ɪ]nd w[aɪ]nd you up
There are different assumptions as to why the vowels in 'wind' (v) and 'wind' (n) are different:
- Donka Minkova says 'the pair wind - wind is a special case, probably best explained on the grounds of homophony avoidance'.
- Jeremy Smith says that this is a sporadic instance of HL where it failed. He goes on to say '[t]his distinction may be the result of a disambiguating choice between variant pronunciations to avoid confusion between two meanings'
- Otto Jespersen says that the noun wind used to have /iː/, but it got shortened by analogy with frequent compounds such as windmill (also OED), window which had short vowels.
- OED and A History of Modern English sounds and morphology by Eilert Ekwall say that the short vowel is due to analogy with windy.
This was a sporadic sound change and only affected certain words. There are many, many words that have a 'voiced homorganic cluster' at the end, yet they have short vowels: band, hand, land, dumb, lamb, sand, send, held, bend, blend, end, rend, send, spend, wend etc. (Minkova)
Notes
- The nasal endings (/ɑn/) were later on lost. The reason 'climb' has /aɪ/ (instead of /iː/) in ModE is because of the GVS.
- /uː/ to /aʊ/ shift is also because of the GVS.
- /eː/ to /iː/ shift can also be ascribed to the GVS.
Abbreviations
- HL: Homorganic Lengthening
- OE: Old English
- ME: Middle English
- ModE: Modern English
- OED: Oxford English Dictionary
- GVS: Great Vowel Shift
References
Best Answer
TLDR
The short answer is that there are certain rules regarding what kind of sound sequences are possible in English, if we used a single pronunciation for the -s endings in every situation, we would end up with ill-formed (and hard-to-pronounce) sequences of sounds, therefore we use three different sounds for the -s in order to conform with those rules. Those rules are called Phonotactic rules.
Explanation
Phonotactics
Every language has a unique set of rules that determine the permissible sequences of sounds. That set of rules is called 'Phonotactic rules' (or 'Phonotactic constraints'). A Dictionary of Phonetics and Phonology by R. L. Trask defines phonotactics as 'the set of constraints on the possible sequences of consonant and vowel phonemes within a word, a morpheme or a syllable' (p277). In simple words, it studies the possible sequences of sounds and the positions where they can be found.
A sequence of sounds that is allowed in one language may be disfavoured in another language, for instance, the Polish word wszczniesz is pronounced /fʂt͡ʂɲɛʂ/; the sequence of sounds at the beginning of this word is allowed in Polish but not in English.
English phonotactic constraints
There are loads of restrictions on syllable structure in Modern English, some of which are:
more constraints here at Wikipedia
Voiceless sound + S
When the plural marker (or third person singular or possessives) is attached to a word that ends in a voiceless sound, it is pronounced not as [z] but as [s] and that's because it would violate the rules I mentioned above and would be hard to pronounce as well (try saying ٭batz). However, when we change the [z] to [s] it makes it easy to pronounce the cluster and it doesn't change the meaning of the word, so we pronounce the -s as [s] after voiceless consonants.
Voiced sound + S
When a word ends in a voiced sound, and we add [z], then they agree in voicing and the combination is permissible. For example, bag + [z] → [bægz] because [g] is voiced.
Sibilants + S
[ʃ] or [ʒ] + S
When a word ends in a sibilant [ʃ], it's voiceless and when we add the [s] then we get *[ʃs] cluster, which isn't permissible and difficult to pronounce, so we insert a vowel between both the sibilants in order to split that illicit cluster. After inserting the vowel, we get [ʃɪs], now we already said that the -s is [z] after a voiced sound, and the vowel is voiced, so we change the [s] back to a [z] and get [ɪz] therefore the word bushes is pronounced bush[ɪz]. When a word ends in [ʒ], we do the same as above.
[s] or [z] + S
[s] and [z] are sibilants, but I'm going to explain them separately. When a word ends in a [s], it's a voiceless sound, so we add the [s] form of the -s ending; bus + [s] → *[bʌss], here we have a geminated s and as we read in the rules, tautosyllabic geminates aren't allowed, therefore we insert an epenthetic vowel [ɪ ~ ə] to break the geminate: [bʌsɪs], we change the terminal [s] back to a [z] because the preceding sound is a voiced sound (vowels are always voiced): [ˈbʌsɪz].
The same goes for words that end in [z]: when a word ends in a [z], we add the [z] form of the -s ending because [z] is voiced: rose + [z] → *[ɹəʊzz], here we have a geminated z, so we need to split that impermissible cluster; therefore, we insert a vowel: [ˈɹəʊzɪz]
Affricates + S
Affricates—[t͡ʃ] and [d͡ʒ]—are complex segments. The second segment in both the affricates is a sibilant. So we get Sibilant + Sibilant, which isn't allowed. Therefore we insert a vowel between the affricate and the [s] or [z] to break that cluster. Beach + [s] → *[biːt͡ʃs] + [ɪ ~ ə] → [biːt͡ʃɪz]
It holds true for possessives and present singular -s too.
NOTES