By Spelling, Vowels

Xam0 wrote:There is definately an upstate NY accent. The vowels in the middle of some words are either changed or pronounced as dipthongs. Ill put the normal spelling of some words followed by the upstate NY pronunciation.. and then the north jersey pronunciation (where im from) which is fairly...

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,...

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?Whether it's written with 2 t's or 3 t's or no t's has absolutely nothing to do with why it's pronounced like that. And to...

foreign languages to comunicate we are able to communicate in English if we know 1000 words

This is really badly off topic but I couldn't resist the temptation to comment on your correct observation. I understand very well that native speakers of English mispronounce foreign words because foreign languages are not studied much in English-speaking countries.Well, can you really blame us?...

I also pronounce "young" and "love" with the same vowel. The reason that "love" has an "o" in Modern and Middle English is because: "The pronunciation of written o in son, love, come, etc. is due to Norman spelling conventions prohibiting writing of u before v, m, n due to the graphical...

>> Native speakers can make mistakes with pronounciation. Unfortunately with English, the spelling does not always give you a clue to the pronounciation, so if people learn a word from seeing it written, they can make mistakes. << Native speakers can of course occasionally make a...

To tell you the truth, I've never heard any foreigner (unless they learned English when they were very young, or had lived in an English speaking country for at least a decade, and had extensive, and personalized accent coaching) ever be able to pull off either an American or British accent....

Pronunciation is very important, but with English that means stress patterns. Getting the stress patterns right for a whole phrase is often more important than getting every single word exactly right. The vowels can be off a bit, but the stress pattern and the consonants should be as...

J Lewis wrote:If you know Latin or Italian they will give you some guide, but this is not perfect, because in French I believe a lot of such words use the "a", not the "e", and this often determines the English. So persistenza (Italian) gives us persistence in English, but resistenza gives us...