Words with lots of vowels, expecially e's, are popular with crossword constructors. Some years ago I read an old book on how to compose crosswords for fun and profit. It recommended words that alternate vowels and consonants, such as

Seriously, a friend of mine is a Tamil-speaking Sri Lankan, and I think he uses a cross between "sh" and "s" in the name. He is exactly correct. Several Indic languages have a consonant that is somewhere between 's' and

I do not know and as I stated, I cannot say with certainty. I am hearing Ukrainian (on the rare occasions when I do hear it) through a Russian filter. My wife is a Russian speaking citizen of Ukraine, as are most of the inhabitants of Kiev. Even

Why would that be important? Because the matter in question was final consonants in Italian. The matter in question was final consonants of words ("Italian words aren't supposed to end with a consonant"), not utterances, unless an

Incidentally, I was a little startled to read earlier in ... ad hoc "ah" as the sound of "a" in "hat". Specifically, he described a pronunciation of "cafe" as "kah-FAY", although he did then

I'm cutting fr.lettres.langue.francaise out of it, and reinstating alt.usage.english., because that's where I'm writing from. Have you found that there is a generational difference in the different pronunciations of "plus"?

Wells's (1) TRAP class, and also his BATH class for those of us who don't use the "father" vowel in "bath" etc. But particular accents of AmE show wildly different realizations of this vowel. At one extreme you have

Dunno what vowels we're dealing with here exactly I've uploaded four small mp3s: http://xoomer.virgilio.it/fb83/hp1.mp3 (54.3 Kb, "beck") http://xoomer.virgilio.it/fb83/hp2.mp3 (76.8 Kb, "thet") He says (DEt), but

Ruud Harmsen filted: In a chat group like alt.usage.english, it's close enough to the sound an English speaker perceives when he or she hears the sound. I will continue to think of the sound as being close to English "h" but with a

What spelling rules? In fact, why is it "spelling" why isn't ... English, and words like these just add to her confusion. Don't worry about it and tell your German friend not to worry about it either. All of us anglophones are