Phonetic Addition and Subtraction

The English language is in the Germanic family of languages, developed after the Norman invasion of England. It's almost easy to imagine it like German-frenchified.

In any case, German and French, while directly unrelated, are both in the larger Indo-European language family, that contains the Romantic, the Germanic, the Slavic, the Celtic and the Baltic families, as well as Romanian. Basque, totally unrelated to everything is also in Europe, is a bit of an orphan. The other "main" family of languages in Europe is the Finno-Urgic, which has Estonian, Finnish, and Hungarian.

There's a reason I'm mentioning this. In English, we use two letters for the theta sound. In the Hellenic alphabet, which is used for writing Greek, they use a single symbol, the "theta", for the "t-h" sound.

In English we combine "t" and "h" to get the sound "th". Okay. So what? In German, one of the parents of English, they don't regularly use the theta sound. Whereas we use the, this, that, and thing, German uses der/die/das, diese, das, and dinge. We've replaced the "d" with "th". In fact, Germans rarely make a theta sound, since in common use, an "h" after a consonant is used to lengthen to sound of the vowel that proceeds it. Example: "Neanderthal", in German, has no theta sound, and could be more easily written as "Neandertaal", and is now mostly written as "Neandertal".

I'm giving the background because those languages are connected, and their differences are mostly skin deep. To get to the root of the title of this post, phonetic addition and subtraction, we'll be looking at unrelated languages and another, more fundamental sound issue, a phonetic basis.

The languages are English and Magyar (Hungarian), and the sounds are "sssssssssssssssssssssss" and "sssshhhhhhhhhhhhhh". Sounds I'm familiar with.

There is a reason that the "S" is shaped like a snake, and in the Indo-European languages it makes the "sssssssssssssssssssss" sound. But in Magyar, this isn't the case.

In Magyar, the letter "S" actually makes the "shh" sound. The capitol city of Budapest, in Hungary, is actually two cities joined by the Donau (the Danube River): hilly Buda on one side, and flat-landed Pest. There, though, when you hear the locals say it, they call it Pesht and Budapesht.

But that's how we would write it. In Magyar spelling conventions, my last name would be Serwood, and it would sound the same.

We, in English, add the symbol of the letter "h" to the letter "s" to form the "shh" sound. Phonetic addition by symbol addition.

Well, if the "S" in Magyar is the "shh" sound, then what do they do for the sound "sss"?

What they do is add the letter "z" to the letter "s" to get the "sss" sound. Which may be one of the cooler combos in the Latin alphabet. I've friends with last names Szyarto and Szetella, pronounced like "Syarto" and "Setella", which may not be that normal looking anyway, but with the "z", one may bet even more perplexed.

In truth, if you see someone's name has the "sz" combo, you can pretty much be sure that they're family came from Hungary, or there's a Magyar patriarch somewhere along the line.

They, in Magyar, add the symbol of the letter"z" to the letter "s" to form the "sss" sound. Phonetic subtraction by symbol addition.

I like to imagine the "z" slicing the "hhh" sound off the original Magyar "s" = "shh" sound. It is, of course, much more complicated than that.

The sounds, "sss" and "shh" happen in different places in the mouth, and we English speakers take for granted that the primary sound for the letter "S" has to be the "sss" sound, when there's not a necessarily physical reason for that to be the case.