SL Rockfish

Hello, hello, hello, my friends.

Welcome back to another edition of English Makes No Sense, the podcast where we have fun with the English language one lesson at a time.

Today, we're going to take a look at something that's totally illogical.

And very confusing.

And it comes at the request of Dr. Bolster, fourth grade bilingual class at Rogers Street Academy.

And they had a really good question the other day.

They said, why do words like future, F-U-T-U-R-E, and nature, N-A-T-U-R-E, sound like they have a ch sound?

When there is clearly a T and a U and no CH, why isn't it future?

Why is it future and not future?

Hmm.

Well, I hope we can clear up this mystery right now.

Are you ready?

Come on.

Oh, yeah.

Let's get going.

Okay, in American English, when T plus U come together in certain positions, the sound often changes to ch, the ch sound.

This process is called, wait for it, palatalization.

Woo, baby, that's a big word.

Palatalization.

Fun fact, never heard of that word until I started looking into why the T-U-R becomes a ch.