I can’t think of any word that has the same two consonants with all variations of short vowels and diphthongs if possible. I thought of words like: pal/pill/pale/pile/pull/pool/pol/peel. But this list doesn’t complete the list of vowels. Can you help me out?
You’re going to have to specify which English dialect you’re working in — without your location, we can’t even guess. This chart shows how the pronunciations of various vowels can change from dialect to dialect: do “cot” and “caught” have the same vowel? “Run” and “put”? “Hood” and “soon”?
I’m interested in Standard American English or Standard British English which are commonly used in dictionaries like Oxford and Longman.
Might I suggest that it’s unlikely a legitimate solution exists? But if you insist on searching, start by looking at words containing the less common vowels; e.g., those of “boy” and “bird”. You can rule consonant-pairs out much quicker that way…
Can we first establish just how many vowels there are in English? I can think of at least 15, off the top of my head, but I’m sure that linguists know of more.
Well, it depends, of course. There’s a standard 24 lexical sets for stressed vowels, but any particular dialect will merge many of them; furthermore, for the purposes of the OP, it’s probably fairest to throw out the r-colored vowels (except perhaps the “nurse” vowel? Well, we’ll find it easier if we throw that out too). That brings us down to 17; if we ignore the trap-bath and lot-cloth splits, and engage in the father-bother and cot-caught mergers to make things easier, we’ll be down to a more manageable 13. [The five “short” and five “long” vowels of kindergarten (assuming your kindergarten engaged in the same bizarre letters-with-breves-or-macrons-based phonological instruction as mine), plus those of “boy”, “book”, and “loud”].
Which short A sound are you including, the one in “father”, or the one in “dad”? (I assume you’re counting the one in “about” as being the same as the short U). And I’d also include an entry for the schwa, which can be constructed by taking a very unstressed version of any of them, but which is functionally separate.
In accordance with my kindergarten instruction, I’m taking “short A” as the one in “dad” and “short O” as the one in “cot” and “bother” (and also “caught” and “father”, given the stipulated mergers). I know; those names don’t make that much sense.
I left out schwa because I’m restricting myself to stressed vowels (well, that, and, I’m leaving out as much as I can get away with).
Although it’s about how words are spelled and not how they’re pronounced, this Game Room thread may be of some interest.