Why does English spelling not match its pronunciation?
The unlucky thing for English spelling is that during the very same time, huge changes in pronunciation were happening. But by the time all those sound changes were widespread and complete, the spellings for those words had been established. There was also a massive change to the vowel system during that period.
Why is hour pronounced our?
‘Our’ has two sounds in it. Both are vowels. The first sound is a diphthong/vowel glide (au) as in out and the second sound is a weak vowel as in about (a-bout) i.e the first sound of the word about. It means it is pronounced like hour.
Why are English words pronounced differently?
Words may also sound different than they look because the pronunciation is borrowed from another language. English has words from Greek, German, Latin, and other languages that all have their own pronunciation rules. The best way to learn how to pronounce these words is just through practice and memorization.
Why is English pronunciation so irregular?
English spellings and pronunciation are so strange because the language is really a mix of lots of different languages. In fact, English is made up of words taken from Latin, Greek, French and German, as well as little bits and pieces of other local languages like Celtic and Gaelic.
Why English spelling is sometimes different from its pronunciation?
Originally Answered: Why are English words pronounced different from the way they are written? Sometimes it is because a word was borrowed from another language, but the way that language pronounces that word is difficult or sounds odd in English, so English speakers pronounce it differently.
Are our and hour pronounced the same?
OUR and HOUR are pronounced the same: long OW-ER. It rhymes with power.
What is the difference between hour and our?
Hour and our are two words that are pronounced in the same way but are spelled differently and have different meanings. They are homophones. The word hour is derived from the Greek word hōra, which means season. Our means belonging or involving the speaker in addition to others, belonging or involving us.
Why is read pronounced two different ways?
In Middle English (1100–1500) a phonological (sound) change shortened vowels before two consonants, and then later in Middle English double consonants shortened to a single consonant, but the difference in vowel sound stayed the same, so we got read [ri:d] (present) vs [rE:d] (past).
Why is English not phonetic?
Like we all know, the English alphabet has 26 letters. This, consequently, makes English a non-phonetic language, which means that the pronunciation of a word is not dependent on its spelling.
Why is English not phonetically consistent?
Originally Answered: Why isn’t English phonetically consistent? It consists of words and morphemes from all sorts of languages with different rules for pronunciation of different letters and letter clusters. That leads to a lot of conflicting “rules” that really don’t apply in general.
What is the correct pronunciation of the word the?
The pronunciation of the word “the” depends on the first sound of the word that comes after it. When the word after “the” begins with a consonant sound, people usually use /ðə/. When the word after “the” begins with a vowel sound, people usually use /ði/.
How do English speakers pronounce words borrowed from other languages?
English speakers frequently retain (if sometimes loosely) the original pronunciation of words borrowed from other languages. From French, we have bourgeois (boo jwah) and debris (duh bree).
What are some words that are pronounced different from their spelling?
As a non native English speaker, I am astonished at the amount of English word pronounced different from their spelling. For instance, ‘Would’ is pronounced like ‘Wood’, ‘Whole’ is pronounced like “Hole”, and despite ‘though’, ‘through’, ‘thorough’ and ‘thought’ have similar spelling, their pronunciation is just vaguely similar, among many others.
Why is pronunciation not an intrinsic component of the phonology?
Pronunciation is not an intrinsic component of the dic- tionary. For some languages, such as Spanish, Swahili, and Finnish, the correspondence between orthography and pronunciation is so close that a dictionary need only spell a word correctly to indicate its pronunciation. Modern English, however, displays no such consistency in sound