Saturday, March 25, 2006

Garlicky Lentil Soup

Why must one add a "k" to the word garlic in order to make it an adjective? Garlicky. It looks so wrong.

3 comments:

PopStar said...

yucky looks kinda garlicky too

Chaka said...

Presumably because "garlicy" would be mispronounced as /gar.li.si/. English "c" represents /k/ in most contexts but before mid-to-high front vowels (i.e., "i", "e", and "y") it generally represents /s/.

Of course, English words ending in the /k/ sound usually aren't spelled with a "c" by itself. Garlic is somewhat unusual English spelling in that sense. One would expect garlick--I imagine that was a common variant spelling that for some reason was not selected as the standard.

Pirate Jimmy said...

I'll garLICKy YOU!

Yeah, I said it.
It's out there.