There is one consonant-combination that does not abide by the four syllable rules described before: ch. This combination is never separated. It is another way of writing the letter g.* For this reason, we regard is as a single consonant. The words below are therefore not separated by three consonants (c, h and t) but by two (ch and t or r and ch).
| lachen
| la-chen
| to laugh
|
| richel
| ri-chel
| ridge
|
| zuchten
| zuch-ten
| to sigh
|
| krachten
| krach-ten
| forces, energy
|
| rechter
| rech-ter
| judge
|
| monarchie
| mo-nar-chie
| monarchy
|
lachen, richel, zuchten, krachten, rechter, monarchie
And of course, observing the 4th rule: if ch is enveloped by consonants (e.g. 'rcht'), we place ch at the end of the preceding syllable (like with koortsig, ambtenaar, etc.). If we do not do this, the second syllable starts with ch + another consonant (which will generally make it hard to pronounce).
| burchten
| burch-ten
| castles
| not: bur-chten
|
burchten
The reason why ch is considered to be one consonant is simple. Look what happens if we treat it as two consonants: a word like lachen would be divided as lac-hen. This completely changes the pronunciation of the separate syllables: as in English, the c at the end of a syllable is pronounced as k. We do get another problem, being the length of the vowel but we will get to that later.
(*) There used to be a difference between the pronunciation of ch and g but nowadays, most Dutch speakers no longer make this distinction. There is still a substantial minority of Dutch speakers –mainly in Flanders- who pronounce ch and g differently.
All mp3 files on this page:
lachen, richel, zuchten, krachten, rechter, monarchie
burchten.
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