Comment by eel | Hacker News Reader

Comment by eel | Hacker News Reader

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.

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".

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".

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).

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.

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