h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I love that there were once professional 'clock watchers'. I've always had a problem pronouncing your hootoo name but I think of it as a "silent g as in gnat" and it's interesting to learn what it means in ancient Greek.

The coincidence is, before I read this, I had already mentioned Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass in the next constellation I'm writing up, where Alice was playing croquet using a pink flamingo for a mallet (Grus the crane has been known historically as a flamingo, a stork...oh well, save it for PR)

GB

I'm glad I'm not the only one who didn't know how to pronounce Gnomon.
The first time I heard that the g was silent was last year at Kew gardens, whe´n TC said to me: It's a shame that (g)nomon couldn't make this meet. I said: Who?
Gnomon, you know, from Dublin.

Afterwards, I found out that the g in gnome is silent, too.

Gnasher and gnat were new to me as well.

Is there a list somewhere for us poor foreigners so we can look them up?

When gn comes at the start of an English word, the g is always silent. As is the k at the start of any word beginning with kn. In Shakespeare's time, they would have pronounced the g and the k. THe word 'know' was pronounced like "kennow". In England they dropped the k while in Scotland they dropped the "now"; the Scottish for know is "ken".

Oh, thank you, that's very helpful. I didn't know about the rule, although I knew about the k words, and we probably learnt this rule in school, but that's quite some decades ago.