3 ms·

In English, the grapheme "d" very commonly represents the sound /d/. Likewise, the grapheme "j" in English very commonly represents the sound /dʒ/. Additionall

by eel 14y ago

In English, the grapheme "d" very commonly represents the sound /d/. Likewise, the grapheme "j" in English very commonly represents the sound /dʒ/. Additionally /dʒ/ is a single distinct sound. There is no /d/ sound in /dʒ/. It's an unfortunate issue that IPA notation might make it appear as though /dʒ/ is the concatenation (borrowing a programming term) of /d/ and /ʒ/ when it is most certainly not. The author's assertion might make sense if affricates such as dʒ represented multiple sounds, but I am not aware of any linguists that subscribe to such an idea. So when we say "the D is silent" in the word Django to other English speakers, we are implying that there is no /d/ sound at the start of the word, and that would be correct. The author's argument does not make any sense here.

_delirium 14y ago
More careful IPA emphasizes this by not transcribing it as the sequence of characters /dʒ/, though doing so is still common. For a while the solution was to use a ligature, /ʤ/, to emphasize that it was a single consonant, not a sequence of two consonants, but that was typographically to difficult to distinguish from /dʒ/, so now /d͡ʒ/ is preferred, using the generic IPA kludge for "these two characters should be treated as one".
- jtauber 14y ago
  Yeah, I didn't bother with /d͡ʒ/ (incidentally, neither does Wikipedia in their pronunciation of Django Reinhardt's name) because my main point was to explain the origin of the <d> in the name "Django".
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
jtauber 14y ago
I honestly don't think people who say "the D is silent" are making a distinction between the true affricate and /dʒ/. Saying "the D is silent" is missing the most sensible explanation for why the name "Django" is spelled that way: namely that the <j> would normally be pronounced /ʒ/ in French (not sure about Romani).
jtauber 14y ago
While the affricate /d͡ʒ/ is not pronounced as a separate stop+fricative, it can result from the combining of the stop and the fricative and that is presumably what is behind the choice of "dj" as a digraph for representing /d͡ʒ/ in Django.

by eel 14y ago

_delirium 14y ago

More careful IPA emphasizes this by not transcribing it as the sequence of characters /dʒ/, though doing so is still common. For a while the solution was to use a ligature, /ʤ/, to emphasize that it was a single consonant, not a sequence of two consonants, but that was typographically to difficult to distinguish from /dʒ/, so now /d͡ʒ/ is preferred, using the generic IPA kludge for "these two characters should be treated as one".

jtauber 14y ago
Yeah, I didn't bother with /d͡ʒ/ (incidentally, neither does Wikipedia in their pronunciation of Django Reinhardt's name) because my main point was to explain the origin of the <d> in the name "Django".
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]

jtauber 14y ago

I honestly don't think people who say "the D is silent" are making a distinction between the true affricate and /dʒ/. Saying "the D is silent" is missing the most sensible explanation for why the name "Django" is spelled that way: namely that the <j> would normally be pronounced /ʒ/ in French (not sure about Romani).

jtauber 14y ago

While the affricate /d͡ʒ/ is not pronounced as a separate stop+fricative, it can result from the combining of the stop and the fricative and that is presumably what is behind the choice of "dj" as a digraph for representing /d͡ʒ/ in Django.