Hi there,

I am a non-native English teacher. I want to explain to my students the reasons behind the difference in pronouncing 'write' and 'written' is that 'written' has double Ts. How can I tell them about this?

Second question: I want to tell students the correct of pronunciation of 'Donald'. It should not be pronounced as 'Do-nald'. It should be spoken as 'Don-nald' because 'n' is shared by the two vowels 'o' and 'a'. So how can I explain this in correct written and spoken English?

Newcomer

It seems to me that you are wrestling with the "Second-Letter Rule", which says that a single vowel letter (i.e., not combined with another vowel letter in a digraph) is pronounced tense if the second letter after it is another vowel letter, lax otherwise.  (lady, caddie, hope, hop, hoping, hopping, June, junk, bite, bit, bitty, bitten, ...)   Unfortunately, this rule has only limited application, typically in one-syllable words and in final stressed syllables of polysyllabic words.  And the rule never works when v is involved because v is virtually never doubled.  (*livved! *givven! *devvil!)  Several other cases also conspire to make the rule less than universal.

The Second-Letter Rule works for write and written, but not for Donald.  You're correct that for the spelling to match the pronunciation in a system where the Second-Letter Rule always works, Donald would have to be spelled *Donnald.

I suggest that you introduce a phonetic spelling system to your students to illustrate how words are pronounced.  You may want to point out some common correspondences between the spelling and the pronunciation, all the while warning your students that these correspondences cannot always be relied on, and often the pronunciation of a word simply must be memorized separately from the spelling.

CJ