1115: The Misconceptions of Hard and Soft Dec 28, 2017

Hard and soft consonants do exist, and lay people use the terms quite extensively at times to describe sounds in English, but this this is not accurate. Other languages—famously Russian and other Slavic ones—have hard and soft consonants, the difference being that soft consonants are palatized and may sound therefore as if they are followed with a [j] (like the Y in 'yellow'). When people say that something is a hard consonants in English—which is not an applicable technical term in this case—it can mean lots of different things. Sometimes it refers to spelling and not phonetics, such as the G in 'giraffe' being considered soft as opposed to the G in 'gun' which would then be hard. At other times, it can reflect the different allophones of, for example, /t/, which can be considered to be the same sound, but will be more sonorous in words like 'top', than in 'pot', but neither of these examples are how linguists would use the words. If you have encountered other examples of the misuse of the terms 'hard' and 'soft', comment below. You can also support Word Facts on Patreon for more content: https://www.patreon.com/wordfacts