A letter may stand for two or more different sounds
Answers
Answer:
If you want to store a large, complex system such as the English spelling system in a finite human brain, you have to organise it well.
To organise something, you first need an organising principle or principles.
If you want to use the relationship between letters and sounds as your organising principle for spelling (and most sensible people do), you can start from the letters and work to the sounds, or start from the sounds and work to the letters.
Starting from the letters
There are 26 letters in the English alphabet, but English also has a whole stack of letter combinations that can represent individual sounds:
Two letter combinations, like “oo” as in “book”, “er” as in “her”, “ph” as in “phone” and “ey” as in “key”
Three letter combinations, like “igh” as in “high”, “dge” as in “bridge”, “tch” as in “catch” and “ere” as in “here”.
Four letter combinations, like “eigh” as in “eight”, “aigh” as in “straight”, “augh” as in “caught”, and “ough” as in “bought”, “drought”, “dough”, “through”, “thorough” (but not “cough” or “tough”, where the “ou” and the “gh” represent different sounds, and just happen to be next to each other).
To add to the complexity, many letters and letter combinations can represent more than one sound, for example, the letter “y” represents four different sounds in the words “yes”, “by”, “baby” and “gym”. The spelling “ea” represents three different sounds in the words “beach”, “dead” and “break”.
As well as more common letter-sound patterns, there are letter-sound patterns that only occur in one or two words, like the “sth” in “asthma” and “isthmus”, and the “xe” in “axe”, “deluxe” and “annexe”.
It's an almost impossible task to use letters and letter patterns to organise your thinking about spelling, as there are simply so many of them and their relationships with sounds are so complex.
After a while it starts to seem that there must be thousands of sounds in English, whereas there are only 44[1] . So let's try using sounds as our organising principle.
Starting from sounds
The sounds of English are:
Three pairs of consonants made by stopping airflow in the mouth then letting it go:
“p” as in pop, puppy and cantaloupe (voiceless lip sound).
“b” as in bob, rubber, build and cupboard (voiced lip sound).
“t” as in tot, butter, backed, joked, laundrette, torte, Thomas, receipt, debt, yacht, indict and pizza (voiceless tongue tip sound).
“d” as in did, muddy, wagged, aide and jodhpurs (voiced tongue tip sound).
“k” as in cot, king, luck, quit, chrome, mosque, khaki, liquor, accord, excel, Bourke, trekking, acquaint, racquet and zucchini (voiceless back of the tongue sound).
“g” as in go, biggest, guide, ghoul and morgue (voiced back of the tongue sound).
Three pairs of consonants made through your nose using your voice:
“m” as in mum, hammer, limb, autumn, programme and paradigm (lip sound).
“n” as in non, runner, know, reign, cayenne, pneumonia and mnemonic (tongue tip sound).
“ng” as in wing, think and tongue (back of the tongue sound).
Four pairs of friction sounds made by squeezing air through narrow spaces in the mouth:
“th” as in thin, Matthew and phthalates (voiceless tongue-between-teeth sound).
“th” as in this and breathe (voiced tongue-between-teeth sound).
“f” as in far, sniff, phone, cough, Chekhov, gaffe, carafe and often[2] (voiceless teeth on lip sound).
“v” as in vat, love, skivvy, of, Stephen and Louvre (voiced teeth on lip sound).
“s” as in sell, city, voice, house, scent, pass, whistle, psychologist, quartz, coalesce, mousse, sword, asthma, and waltz.
“z” as in zip, is, pause, dazzling, bronze, xylophone, dessert, business and tsar/czar.
“sh” as in ash, lotion, passion, pension, facial, chef, schnitzel, moustache, ocean, sugar, appreciate, initiate, conscience, tissue, cushion, crescendo and fuchsia.
“zh” as in beige, vision, pleasure, aubergine, déjà vu, seizure, equation and casuarina.
One pair of sounds made by stopping the air and then releasing it through a narrow space in the mouth:
“ch” (a combination of “t” and “sh”) as in chair, hutch, creature, bocconcini, cappuccino, kitsch, luncheon, question, righteous, ciao and Czech.
“j” (a combination of “d” and “zh”) as in jar, gem, sponge, ridge, budgie, religion, adjust, suggest, educate, soldier and hajj.