award, await, select, around, begin, rebel . . . and so on and so on.
That’s just one general pattern of spelling, but remember there are no “rules” of spelling in the sense that the way something is written dictates how we speak. Spelling follows speech (or tries to) not vice-versa. It helps not to reduce the vowel system of English to a question of “long” and “short,” because we have more than ten vowels.
I assume he is a Charter Member and has added the title “Charter Member” to his name. Or something like that.
I should have added “when the emphasis is on the first syllable”. And your first two examples are not of a short vowel-- those are schwas. Not sure why you included “begin”, since the “e” is long. “Rebel” is questionable, since it can be pronounced either way. Not sure which came first.
There is a general rule, with exceptions of course, that a double consonant signifies a short vowel preceding it. It’s why we write running instead of runing.
The idea that there are no rules is laughable. There are rules, with some exceptions. The double consonant is one of them.
Grammar is both descriptive and prescriptive.
Descriptive because it must be flexible enough to change with the times.
Prescriptive because it must slow down change enough that we can all generally agree on enough language constructs to allow for efficient exchange.
You can’t have it entirely either way.
Of course it has everything to do with syllable stress (which is why the “rule” becomes even less of a rule, as it must ignore something so important in English pronunciation). Why would you think a schwa (or a reduced /I/) is not a vowel? It’s the most common vowel in English, and vowel reduction is probably one of most important characteristics of the English vowel system. As for the first vowel in begin, few people pronounce it “long” (/i/) in natural discourse–they only do that when they affect their speech–often because of their perception of this “rule,” most likely. (Otherwise they pronounce it much closer to /I/, because it’s not natural to tense a reduced vowel.) These things (syllable stress, vowel reduction, affectation) speak to my point about “rules.” These “rules” are not what tell us how to speak. Rather, they’re guidelines for helping us to spell according to convention. We speak the way speak, period–except, of course, for when we affect our speech momentarily because of some perceived notion of how we “should” say something because of spelling. When you record people speaking naturally and analyze their discourse, they drop these affectations.
In general, the “rule” we’re talking about is useful as a spelling aid. I just prefer to call it a “guideline” for writing, instead. I don’t mean to say that it’s not valid–the problem for me is when it somehow gets reversed and people think that the writing “controls” the way we speak. E.g., “Oh, look–there’s only one consonant here, so the correct way to pronounce it is like this,” etc. (I should add, too, that just because we write two consonant letters, doesn’t mean there are two consonants. Tiger and Tigger have the same number of consonants.)
Not a trick question. I’ve seen a lot of people, operating under either analogy to twelve or their local dialect voicing the sound, who will make it -vth instead of -fth.
He was the twelvth of the Elvish kings.
I agree with your post, except for this…the person you are responding to said the schwa wasn’t a “SHORT” vowel. This is true, if we use the third-grader definition of “short” – “a” is in “father”, “e” as in “left”, “i” as in “sit”, “o” as in “boss”, and “u” as un “cup”, and nothing more.
As others have pointed out, while this does capture SOMETHING about English phonetics, it’s pretty limited and misleading to call these the “short” vowel sounds, and just leave it at that. Probably better, in most conversations, to just avoid using the categories “long” and “short”. (But keep the concept of “shortening”).
I thought that, in the English vowel system, which admittedly is very odd, “a” as in “father” is a long vowel. The “a” in “fat” is a short vowel. The letter “a” has two long vowels (which is part of the idiosyncrasy of English vowels) – “a” as in “father” and “a” as in “fate”.
Nope. That’s the kind of thing they teach you in third grade, and it’s (mostly) crap.
There just happen to be a bunch of vowel sounds in English (something like thirty, IIRC, depending on how you slice 'em, and depending on the regional dialect.) We use the five or six vowel LETTERS to represent these various vowel sounds (and combinations of sounds), in ways that have “rules” (patterns) but also many exceptions.
Some of the sounds we are taught to be “long vowels” are really better analyzed as “dipthongs”: two vowel sounds in a row. Example: “a” as in “make” (or “ay” as in “say”) is really “a” (the long but clipped “a”, spelled “e” in IPA, which doesn’t really exist in English, but does in Spanish, etc.), FOLLOWED IMMEDIATELY BY “ee” (“i” in IPA). Others aren’t, they’re just simple vowel sounds (that “ee” sound, for example).
The “a” as in “hat” is another sound altogether, spelled “ae” (with the “a” and the “e” linked to make one symbol) in IPA.*
Some languages truly have long and short vowels with meaningful (phonemic) distinctions – in Yucatec Maya, for example, “kak” means “squirrel” and “kaak” means “fire”, and the only difference is that the second one is pronounced literally for a longer period of time. English doesn’t have this. (There IS a lengthening and shortening involved in some of the English vowel contrasts, but it’s not the main thing that’s going on, and it’s interesting only to historical linguists and to those who study every minute aspect of the speech process.)
(*So, you COULD call this the “second long ‘a’ sound in English” if you wanted to, but there’s no particular reason to.)
I agree with that, but I still find it odd to have the “a” in “father” described as a short vowel. There’s a short version of that vowel in German, e.g., in “Fach”, which is quite different from the “a” in English “fat”. So you can say that short/long vowel is not a useful distinction in English (unlike in languages like Japanese and Latin), but it doesn’t mean that “a” in father is a short vowel – it’s just not a diphthong.
Bill Bryson’s book is absolutely riddled with errors. See this previous thread:
Interested in languages? Stay the hell away from Bill Bryson!
Exactly. Better to call it “open back unrounded” rather than “short”.
The entire rule is:
i before e, except after c
and when the sound is “a”
as in “neighbor” and “weigh”
But I know a seismologist who thinks this is kind of weird.
“diphthongs”
When we were taught the traditional English system of long and short vowels (as opposed to the linguistic definitions of those terms), I don’t recall the “a” in father being placed in either category. I’d consider it short, myself, as in my dialect it is nearly identical (if not identical) with a short “o” sound, as in “cot.” The main rule I remember about long vowels is that “they say their name.”
I was taught in school in central London that “i before e, except after c”. Nothing further.
Later the TV program QI pointed out there were more exceptions to this rule than words that obeyed it…
Weird!
It helps to do just that, because one of the characteristics of some dialects (such as southern US) is to produce such vowels more distinctly as diphthongs, which effectively is a kind of lengthening. Standard NE “compacts” them.
At least in my case, if you have a Custom Title Charter Subscription, it seems to default to just restating “Charter Member” again if you don’t choose another phrase.
Why not?
Why not?