Pronunciation 8: Writing and Sound

In the previous pronunciation post, we reviewed the vowel sounds. Now let's think about how they are related to how we write words. I'm going to make a distinction between two types of words: 'standard spelling' and 'non-standard spelling'.

Let's look at some examples:

Sound	Standard Spelling	Non-standard Spelling
hat	hat
hed		head
scārf	scarf
coet	coat
lārf		laugh
ruum	room
cuk	cook
blud		blood

Standard Spelling

'scarf' is standard spelling but 'laugh' is not

'Standard spelling' is predictable, and in some cases, you will be able to pronounce a written word just by looking at it.

For example, the words 'hat', 'scarf' and 'coat' are totally predictable. If you see the written words, you can pronounce them, if you know that 'a' makes an a sound, 'ar' makes an ār sound and 'oa' makes an oe sound.

Maybe 'oa' doesn't make an oe sound in your language, but it does in English. It's predictable, so it's standard spelling.

There are other situations where you see a word and you don't know for certain how it is pronounced. The pronunciation here may still be predictable: perhaps we have two possibilities instead of one.

For example, in standard spelling, the letter combination 'oo' either makes an uu sound or an u sound. So the word 'room' could logically be pronounced ruum or rum, and the word 'cook', could be cuuk or cuk.

But 'room' is ruum and 'cook' is cuk. There is no way of knowing for certain until you hear the word being used, but there were only two possibilities to begin with. You have a 50/50 chance of guessing the right one.

This is still classified as 'standard spelling.'

(Actually, depending on where they live, some people say rum for 'room' and others say cuuk for 'cook'.)


Non-standard Spelling

'cook' and 'room' are standard spelling but 'blood' is not

Non-standard Spelling' is not easily predictable, and it is hard to find any rules at all.

The words 'head', 'laugh' and 'blood' are all non-standard. The way they are written doesn't match the way we say them. Why don't we write 'hed', 'larf', and 'blud'? That would be logical, right?

Or why don't we pronounce them, heed, lōr and bluud (or blud)?

Sorry, this is the way it is with non-standard spelling. On the positive side, when you start to group words together in families, you will start to see patterns. We will deal with this in later posts.


Let's stick with the standard stuff for now... in the next post we'll talk about how to understand the relationship between standard spelling and sounds.