Quote:
Originally Posted by JSWolf
One very good change was getting rid of the name zed for the letter Z (pronounced zee). Zed doesn't really fit when you say the alphabet.
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Ah, but that's accent-dependent. Nobody ever pronounces the u in colour or the b in debt (indeed, the b is a late introduction and the word used to be spelled without it). But I pronounce the z when it appears in words 'zuh', like most who speak some variant of Home Counties or Estuary English. Not zee. (Though it is true that spoken as a word, 'zee' matches the spoken form of other letters more. Hm now I'm wondering where those come from. The OED suggests that 'zed' may come from French, which means we can probably blame the Normans: thinking about the French spoken alphabet, it definitely fits in better there. I suspect a lot are much older.)
This is obviously totally relevant to Kindles since you can, uh, read them aloud to your children?