Why do people say sickth when it should be sixth?

Answer 1

This is not an easy question. The problem is the phrase "it should be". If you are coming from the point of view of grammarians, then proper spelling, pronunciation and grammar are primary. Of course these things are important, and if I were interviewing potential law or medicine students, any who could not pronounce "sixth" would bear a closer look, or would be quickly eliminated from the list.

On the other hand, the truth is that a language is the way people speak, and the spoken word came before the written word. Languages do change, and English is particularly good at change. This is probably because from its beginning as a creolized form of Danish and other languages in its early history, English has been borrowing words and modifying words at a rapid rate. There is a tendency, reasonably well understood by linguists, for the sounds we make in words to change over time, and I don't pretend to be able to outline any of the exact technical details. But if you listen carefully to the word sixth, you hear 3 consonant sounds at the end, with no vowel sounds between: k-s-th. This is obviously harder to say than 'sickth', even if 'sickth' sounds awful. If you could travel into the future several hundreds of years, you might find that 'sickth' or something close is an acceptable, or maybe the only pronunciation of 'sixth', and that by then the spelling might have changed as well.

Now how about the word asked? You have 3 consonant sounds (at least in the written version) in a row: s-k-d. Perhaps at one time it was pronounced ask-ed (two syllables) by English speakers. But I never hear anyone say it that way today. Who doesn't actually say ass'd sometimes when speaking this word? Sometimes you might say it with a terminal 'k' sound (no vowal sound after it) and maybe a 't', as in askt, or maybe even asst. The sounds of words change.