Reply to post: Re: Does anyone care?

Re: Does anyone care?

It turns out that Smart’s dictionary (a “remodelling” of Walker’s dictionary) can be found at archive.org. Here’s what it says in §161 (on p. xxxiii) of its introductory Principles of Pronunciation:

In words of French origin, the digraph ch is sounded like sh ; as in chaise, cartouch ; and, in words of Greek and Italian origin, it is sounded k ; as in chasm, scheme, ache, chord, epoch, baldachin. Here, however, in the sounds of sch before e and i, we have to encounter some striking inconsistencies. Nothing can be more evident than that, if the Greek χ is to be supplied in our orthography by ch, and if this, in default of the extra-aspiration which our language allows not to a consonant, necessarily identifies with k, the word schism, and schedule, should have sch pronounced as they are in scheme ; yet an unnecessary reference of schedule to its French denizenship, with some vague notion perhaps of the alliance of our English sh to the Teutonic sch, has drawn the word into the very irregular pronunciation shĕdʹuͥle ; while the other word, schism, from a notion, probably, that, as h is silent, the c should be soft before i, has taken the equally irregular sound sĭzm ; an irregularity the more extraordinary, since in the word sceptic, (Class II.¹⁵⁵) the c is kept hard for the purpose of showing off a familiarity with the word in Greek, although no letter intervenes between the c and the e, and consistency requires that the c in scene, equally related to the Greek k, and the c in sceptic, should be sounded alike. As, however, on other occasions, so in this, we must give way to usage, or incur the effect of opposing it. Drachm is another word that drops ch, as already remarked at 157.

(The dictionary uses italics to represent silent letters in pronunciations; sample words with silent letters reverse that convention. The blockquote above reverses the conventions of the dictionary.)