Do you utter the plural of "ad" (or "fad") "ads" or "adz" ("fads" or "fadz")?

While it is spelled with an 's', the standard American pronunciation is 'adz'...

Definitely "adz" with the buzzing 'z,' as facemaker said. The only time I can think where it wouldn't be "dz" in English would be compound words like "birdsong" or "midship," for example.

American English is a weird language, and would take way to long to complaing about. But yeah, ads is pronounced adz. Right now I am trying to break myself of dropping the K sound from asked.

If I try to pronounce the "s" as an "s" it sounds like I'm saying "ats."

All languages are weird, and it's not just American English where the 'ds' is 'dz.' ^_^

American English, and English in general though, is a lot less structured about rules of pronunciation/spelling/grammar. It's why English is generally considered one of the hardest languages to learn as a second language.

The biggest reason English is hard to learn is because so much of it is borrowed from other languages...so you have words that appear the same in singular form, but change drastically when they are pluralized.  You have spelling rules that are constantly invalidated.  You have pronunciations of letter sequences that can go two or three different ways, depending on which language the word came from.  You have foreign words that have been adopted into English, but the grammar surrounding them is totally foreign to their initial language.

It's a language that is made of contradictions.  Even the previous sentence (and this one, as well) is a shining example...a single 's' at the end of a word is usually pronounced as a 'z'.  Except when it isn't.

And then you compound it with inconsistencies between British English, American English, Aussie English...*laugh*  I think it was George Bernard Shaw who described the UK and USA as 'two nations, divided by a common language...'

And then to compound it all, you have Billie Gates and Co inveigling their easy 'spellcheckers' into our culture, trying to teach British kids how to use British English according to American understanding and getting it wrong.

We now have a whole generation of British kids who have learnt British English incorrectly from Americans. The word 'learnt' is underlined in red right now on my computer...

How many Americans would know when to use 'learnt' rather than 'learned' in British English?

Neither do the British kids any more.

Even I, who learned English before computers, struggle to remember, because I see words used and spelled incorrectly so often in daily life, the errors constantly reinforced in my mind. Gatesy is brainwashing me and there's nothing I can do about it, goshdarnit!

And that's not even mentioning the whole culture of 'it doesn't matter, I'll just run it through the spellchecker afterwards'.

</rant> :)

It's definitely a Z sound in ads. (that's "it's" with an apostrophe and an S sound).

To be fair, you can set that to override. I have it set to Australian English on my computer; which is usually leaning towards British; except for Aussie slang which is as weird as anything.

In reply to icosahedron152 (msg # 9):

We didn't just borrow words from other languages. English pursued those language down back allies to mug them for words. Yeah, if you really want confusion, a decade ago, historians decided that the Q and Kw sounds about some old chinese guys needed to be switched or something. I forget the specifics. But... how do you just claim spelling is wrong, after all those years. Especially when the change made the spelling farther from the pronunciation?

Huh... I'm pretty sure I pronounce the "s" on the end of "ads" the same way I pronounce the "s" at the start of "serpent" or "slow".  No "z" buzz at all.

Maybe it's a regional thing?

Almost everything is. The problem with language (and the reason I say ALL languages are weird) is that there's no "correct" way to do languages. While academic versions of every language are taught as the "right way to go about a language," the purpose of those academic versions is an attempt to keep regional influences from dividing common speakers. Languages at the same root level break down pretty quickly when left to their own devices. Any separation, whether it's distance or a cultural barrier, transforms a language by segregating it into a region. Regions have dialects, subregions have subdialects, and on and on until you get to the individual level; every single person has their own idiolect (a word which spellcheck on this site doesn't think exists). Without a level of standardization you get very real scenarios like regions in Italy where, despite everyone claiming to speak Italian, folks from differing corners of the country couldn't understand each other at all, but could understand folks speaking French or Arabic just fine.

To put it simply, based on how languages evolve, what's "right" today in one place or one situation could be completely "wrong" the next day or just down the street. I will admit though, I'm very excited for what the internet is doing to language, since there's a better chance now than ever for a truly universal dialect (so to speak) evolving out of it.

Back to the point though, it's usually not folks like Bill and company making those decisions, it's the folks who use the language the most (usually teenage girls). While spellcheck and autocorrect may influence how we spell when typing, the introduction of words like 'lol' and otherwise into the dictionary as recognized terms, along with alternate spellings that are accepted every day, means that it's no-one-in-particular's fault that people don't know the differences between 'learnt' and 'learned.' It's as natural as losing words or not speaking Middle English. You can point fingers, but ultimately it's up to everyone using the language whether things survive or fade away. As a personal opinion, the fact that we had both "learnt" and "learned" at all is almost an anomaly given their similar meanings, spellings, and pronunciation.

That all being said, English is still a pretty nonsense language. To sum up it all up in a quote from my best friend, "English is a Germanic language with Latin rules, French spelling, and words from literally everywhere else."

</SociolinguisticsLesson>