The strange thing about the two words “woman” and “women” is that the spelling difference is in the second syllable, but the pronunciation difference is in the first. What other pairs of words are like this?
Does child/children count?
Both syllables are pronounced differently. wʊmən vs. wɪmɪn (IPA) or woom-uhn vs. wim-in.
I know what you’re getting at, so this is a semi-nitpick, but in my dialect (and according to dictionary.com in American dialects too) the second syllable is not pronounced the same. In “woman” it’s a schwa, in “women” the second vowel is the same as the first, like the I in “hit” (the near-close near-front unrounded vowel, as they say in the trade). “WIMmin”, in other words.
Hmm, beaten to the punch.
But I think woman/women is an unusual and possibly unique example of “ablaut” (inflection by means of vowel change), in that both vowels change. Ablaut occurs in the plurals of a few Germanic words such as foot/feet and mouse/mice, and more often in irregular past participles such as come/came and meet/met.
Read (present tense)/read (past) is one example where the pronunciation changes but the spelling doesn’t. But these are all one-syllable words. In two-syllable words derived from them, such as become/became, the other vowel doesn’t change.
I don’t really hear the second syllable pronounced differently . . . or at least the difference is extremely subtle.
On the other hand, in “Record” (verb) and “Record” (noun), there does seem to be a change in both vowels. At the very least, the second vowel shifts from stressed to unstressed, and I think in my dialect it changes shape, too.
What I notice about become, as well as other examples like forget/forgot, drive/drove/driven and so on, is that the changing vowel is also the one in the syllable with the main stress. This is not so with women. The word was originally a combination that would rendered in modern English as wife-man, and I point out that in Old and early Middle English the word man had no gender meaning, but simply meant “someone”, or “a person”. Similarly, “wife” simply meant a woman whether married or not; hence a “wife-man” was a woman. So in essence, we had a word much like “stagehand” or “blackbird” today; a root noun preceded by another noun, or an adjective, which narrows its meaning down. WAG: The peculiar pronunciation of women is the result of an extreme case of destressing the primary syllable, and that happened because the key fact to the average speaker in a paternalistic society like medieval England was that a woman was being referred to rather than a man. This would further the tendency for the man part to be de-stressed.
There used to be case endings on words which changed the vowel length by changing the syllabic stress. With those endings knocked off in modern English, it’s not always obvious why a vowel has shifted.