Conversation I had with artificial intelligence chat (A I Chat on Windows) Copilot today on the English language
Tell me all the letters in the English Alphabet that when spelled out the way they are pronounced, don’t start with the original letter.
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This is a fun little linguistic puzzle, and your intuition is right — several letters don’t start with the sound of the letter itself when you say their names out loud.
Letters whose spelled‑out names do NOT start with their own letter
These letters begin with a different sound entirely:
Letter_______Pronunciation ____________ Starts with…
F_____________“ef”___________________________________________E
L_____________“el”___________________________________________E
M_____________“em”___________________________________________E
N_____________“en”___________________________________________E
R_____________“ar”___________________________________________A
S_____________“es”___________________________________________E
X_____________“ex”___________________________________________E
W_____________“double‑you”___________________________________D
Why these letters behave this way
They’re all consonants whose names evolved from older languages (Latin, Greek, French), and the easiest way to pronounce them was to prepend a vowel sound so the consonant could stand alone as a syllable.
That’s why you get “ef,” “el,” “em,” etc. — the vowel is basically scaffolding.
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Letters that Copilot left out from this list are
The letter C, that is pronounced like the word See for sight, with an es. The letter H, that is pronounced: Eich. It starts with the letter E.
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February 19th, 2026
I haven’t posted on my journal in a while and this was the last post I made a few weeks ago so I’ve had this topic on my mind a lot this whole time and I thought I would add some serious ideas I have on the English language. This probably relates to a lot of European languages. I was keeping up with the Prince and Princess of Britain’s English lately because I kind of tripped out the other day when I kind of made a connection on something that’s very exciting and confusing at the same time, but that’s besides the point of this post, because I was talking about the English language and maybe they might agree with me and know who the English language president/director/official might be that could maybe hear my ideas out, probably already know this, though in case they don’t I’ll put my ideas out there because there’s always room for improvement. I’ve decided I will make a video for the rest of this topic and tell y’all my ideas on the language that don’t make sense to me. Specifically the written language, than the spoken language.