Why is there a “d” in “fridge”, but not in “refrigerator” or “refrigerate”?
I have always wondered this. Is there a real reason, or is it just one of those weird little idiosyncrasies of the English language?
dr shorty, VA Girl and Nancy Kay are on the right track.
What happens is this: when you shorten “refrigerator” to the one-syllable “fridge” you move the “g” from the beginning of a syllable (re-fri-ger…) to the END of one.
In English, g is often “soft” (sounding like “j”) at the beginning of a syllable, before e, i or y (germ, “giraffe, gyrate).
But at the END of a syllable/word it doesn’t quite work that way. G all by itself at the end is always treated as “hard” –as in rig, bag…
OR when you DO find a “soft g” sound closing a word it is followed by e, AND the preceding vowel is LONG. For example: age, page, etc.
So, by English spelling conventions, “frig” would rhyme with “rig” and “frige” would rhyme with “OBLIGE”
The way English usually solves this problem — when there is a g at the end of a syllable/word after a SHORT vowel, you write in the “d” –to represent a sound which is already actually part of the ‘soft g sound’. There are many examples of this: badge, ridge, ledge, lodge, budge
(If the adding of a D seems odd, notice that j/soft g is actually not one sound, but a combination of two: d + ‘zh’; a related sound, only not using the voice is the combination t + sh, which we commonly represent with “ch”. ‘zh’, if it looks odd, is simply the “voiced” version of “sh”. It is the sound made by the Z in “azure”)
Actually, I believe the REAL problem here stems from the different ORIGINS of two sets of words. The words ending with “-dge” are generally of Old English lineage, whereas the final (-ge) are from Latin, mostly through French. So although “refrigerator” comes from a Latin word, “fridge” accomodates itself to the common pattern used for the ‘original English’ forms.
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A little overkill (sorry!)
The “rules” above seem to work pretty well when the syllable we’re considering is ACCENTED. When it loses the accent, things may seem more confusing.
Thus there are, in fact, -age words in which the “a” is not long. But neither is it an accented short vowel (as in “badge”)! Instead, the vowel has ended up in an UN-accented syllable where it is scarcely pronounced at all. Example: garbage, adage, manage, pillage. (Not surprisingly, these are largely words borrowed from Latin, mostly through French into Middle English.)
Then there is “garage”. Of course, English speakers can’t even agree on how to pronounce it! Dialects differ on the vowel sound, on which syllable to accent, and often on whether the final g is a “j” or “zh” sound . (In this case I prefer the “zh” as befits its French origin.)
MY FRIDGE! – Refrigerator Rap
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