Pronunciation 10: Spelling Tables... and Chameleons!

In the last pronunciation post, we looked at the spellings with root letter A. This is part of 'standard spelling', which is largely predictable and rational.

Some letter combinations are commonly pronounced in more than one way but remain predictable. I will label these in green and refer to them as chameleons.

Remember that you are not expected to learn all of this in an instant. The idea is to make a connection between what a word looks like and what it sounds like.

Here are the five spelling tables for each root letter, A, E, I, O and U.

Root letter A

From the table, you can see that:

• there is one standard way of spelling a: 'a'.
• there are four standard ways of spelling ae: 'ae', 'ai', 'ay' and 'ei'. The last of these is a chameleon*
• there is only one standard way of spelling ār: 'ar'.
• there are three standard ways of spelling e~: 'air', 'are' and 'eir'.

*'ei' is a chameleon because it can also make the sounds ee and iy.

Root letter E

From the table, you can see that:

• there is one standard way of spelling the sound e : 'e' 
• there are 6 standard ways of spelling ee: 'ee', 'ea', 'ey', 'ie', 'y' and 'ei'. The last three are chameleons* 
• there are three standard ways of spelling ūr, only one of which is written 'er' ('er' = 'ir' = 'ur') 
• there are three standard ways of spelling ee~: 'ear', 'eer', 'ere' 

*'ie' is a chameleon because it can also make the sound iy
*'y' is a chameleon because it can also make the sound iy
*'ei' is a chameleon because it can also make the sounds ae and iy

Root letter I

From the table, you can see that:

• there is one standard way of spelling the sound i : 'i' 
• there are three standard ways of spelling iy: 'ie', 'y' and 'ei', all of which are chameleons* 
• there are three standard ways of spelling ūr, only one of which is written 'ir' ('er' = 'ir' = 'ur') 
• there is one standard way of spelling iy~: 'ire' 

*'ie' is a chameleon because it can also make the sound ee
*'y' is a chameleon because it can also make the sound ee
*'ei' is a chameleon because it can also make the sounds ae and ee


Root letter O

From the table, you can see that:

• there is one standard way of spelling o: 'o' 
• there are three standard ways of spelling oe: 'oa', 'oe' and 'ow', the last of which is a chameleon* 
• there are seven standard ways of spelling ōr: 'or', 'au', 'aw', 'oar', 'oor', 'ore' and 'our', the last of which is a chameleon*
• there are two standard ways of spelling oy: 'oi' and 'oy'. 
• there are two standard ways of spelling ŏ: 'ou' and 'ow', the last of which is a chameleon* 
• there is one standard way of spelling ŏ~: 'our', which is a chameleon*

*'ow' is a chameleon because it makes the sounds ŏ and oe
*'our' is a chameleon because it makes the sounds ŏ~ and ōr

Root letter U

From the table, you can see that:

• there is one standard way of spelling u: 'u', which is a chameleon*
• there are two standard ways of spelling u: 'u', and 'oo', which are both chameleons*
• there are five standard ways of spelling uu: 'ue', 'ui', 'eu', 'ew' and 'oo', the last of which is a chameleon*
• there are three standard ways of spelling ūr, only one of which is written 'ur' ('er' = 'ir' = 'ur')
• there are two standard ways of spelling uu~: 'ure' and 'eur'

*'u' is a chameleon because it makes the sounds u and u

*'oo' is a chameleon because it makes the sounds u and uu

So, for 21 vowel sounds, we had 45 letter combinations, 7 of which were chameleons.

After all that, I think I feel a song coming on!