Why can recognize be pronounced without /g/? On silent letters and French origin in English - and what other explanations there can be.
Résumé
Investigating the phonological patterns, especially the stress patterns, of verbs ending in -ize such as finalize, constitutionalize, etc, the word recognize has attracted my attention. The most wide-spread pronunciation of recognize, with initial stress, is generally unproblematic in the literature: it is a case of non-transparent derivation by -ize with antepenultimate stressing. But other variant pronunciations, recorded in pronunciation distionaries, are phonologically particularly interesting and explaining their existence reveals a lot about the phonology of English.