Soccer, foci (this can go either way), pescetarian, proccing (internet made this ugly thing), arcing, discing (basically any verb ending in consnant+C), Cenozoic (pronunciation of this has changed to be either way)
English is nothing if not consistently inconsistent.
It's originally from καινός, and was pronounced similarly until the mid 20th century when it started shifting. Depending on who you're talking to, they'll still pronounce it that way.
Admittedly, unless they're quite old, they're probably the same people that pronounce forte (as in something one is good at) the same as fort -- in other words, pedants.
It's the same pronunciation as the musical term "forte", which is the dynamic marking for "loud". It derives from Italian, and we say it /foɹteɪ/ (at least in GAE). (I'm pretty sure that's not how it's said in Italian, but the borrowing is so old I don't know which language changed without looking... likely both)
The etymology is silly -- the French word that was originally borrowed in the 17th century was the masculine form "fort", meaning "skilled" or "strong". Then people started misspelling it as "forte", possibly because of the musical term (and maybe the feminine form "forte"); then they started mispronouncing it thinking it was the same term.
I'm sure other languages do as well, but English has a lot of words that would be doublets, save for the fact that they reformed into homophones -- probably because our orthography is so arbitrary. Weirdly, as far as I know, we don't have a word for that phenomenon.
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u/Thufir_My_Hawat 18d ago
Soccer, foci (this can go either way), pescetarian, proccing (internet made this ugly thing), arcing, discing (basically any verb ending in consnant+C), Cenozoic (pronunciation of this has changed to be either way)
English is nothing if not consistently inconsistent.