Common words where W is a vowel

[Powers]

@guizot

This mistaken notion that the letters somehow drive the pronunciation of a language is what I meant by saying “all letters are silent.” Language is speech, first.

Again, I was responding to another poster, who clearly was speaking in the colloquial sense (as I was when I wrote “speaking” there just now). If you’re saying he was correct to say the “w” in “bawl” is silent because ALL letters are silent, I think you’re missing the point.
Powers &8^]

[Powers]

@Indistinguishable

Might as well nip that confusion in the bud by explaining, at some introductory level, how friction and air resistance account for the apparent discrepancies; you don’t have to go into the actual equations of friction and air resistance in order to say “These are phenomena that exist which roughly behave like so-and-so but which we are going to ignore in our models of the world for now”.

Yes, this is my fault. I misread the post as saying “leave out the incorrect pieces and the simplifications” rather than “leave out the incorrect pieces in the simplifications”. Leaving out the simplifications would make introductory physics ridiculously hard to pick up, but I now see that wasn’t what was meant at all.
Powers &8^]