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Hard and Soft Sounds for ‘C’ and ‘G


The Pronunciation of ‘C’ and ‘G’ generally (but not always, see below) depends upon the letter following either 'C' or 'G'.

General Rules

If the following letter is ‘E’, ‘I’ or ‘Y’, the pronunciation is said to be “soft”.
If the following letter is anything else - including a space - the pronunciation is termed “hard”.
A soft ‘C’ is pronounced ‘s’ as in cell, ,city, decision, receive, license, distance, recently, pronounce, juicy, cylinder
A hard ‘C’ is pronounced ‘k’ as in call, correct, cup, cross, class, rescue, fact, public, panic, ache
A soft ‘G’ is pronounced ‘j’ as in general, giant, gymnastic, large, energy, intelligible, changing
A hard ‘G’ is pronounced ‘g’ as in golf, pig, running, great, gum, fragrant, grasp, glut, progress
Words Including Both Hard and Soft Sounds

There are a few interesting words that include both hard and soft sounds. Some examples include:

success, circulate clearance
bicycle, vacancy, garage
gauge, geography, gigantic, gorgeous

When a ‘hard’ pronunciation is wanted, but the following letter would make it ‘soft’, we sometimes add ‘h’ after ‘c’ (as in ‘architect’) or ‘u’ after ‘g’ (as in ‘guest’). Alternatively, the following letter is doubled (as in ‘outrigger’).

These rules also explain some difficult spellings. ‘George’ and ‘guest’ and ‘trigger’ could not be spelt ‘Gorge’ or ‘gest’ or ‘triger’ and still retain their pronunciation. Also, it can now be seen why ‘sag/rag’ and ‘sage/rage’ are spelt and pronounced the way they are.

Exceptions

Nothing is easy - so there are some exceptions to these rules. These mostly involve giving ‘hard’ pronunciation to words where the rule indicates the ‘soft’ sound. These exceptions include:

gear, get, gelding, give girl gift tiger, celt

Present participles of some verbs that end with ‘g’, such as ‘banging’ and ‘ringing’.

Other exceptions are foreign words that have been adopted into the English language, such as: gestalt and geisha

 
This is a very important topic really
Do you know ? Till now some graduated students couldn't differentiate between the soft and hard ones ... but after this good topic that is explained in an easy way I think that no one will pronounce such words in a wrong way

 
God bless your efforts
This topic is fixed for two weeks

 
سحر,
thank you dear for the important topic...anyway i have two links for the same idea...they are like pics and info. it's so funny and i thought that it's so easy to understand it more by using these links, but it's important to read the topic first
the links are
http://rbeaudoin333.homestead.com/files ... t_c_1.html
http://rbeaudoin333.homestead.com/files ... t_g_1.html
good luck everyone hope u like the links as well

 
سحر,
Thanks a lot...beautiful and important topic....
and thanks dear Yara