The Complete Guide to English Spelling Rules (8 page)

With some words, the English prefer to place the accent on the first syllable, whereas North Americans place it on the second or even third syllable.

However, there are no clear rules, and so the student must use a good dictionary.

C
HAPTER 2

Vowels

T
raditionally, there are five vowels in English, but in practice we have six:
a, e, i, o, u,
and
y
. The letter
y
should be included among the vowels whenever possible because it is used as a vowel more often than it is used as a consonant. At times, the letter w acts as an auxiliary vowel when it replaces the letter
u
.

The
y
(or the Greek
i
, as it is called in Spanish) has two vowel sounds:

When the
y
follows a vowel, it helps form an important diphthong and does the work of the letter
i
.

All the vowels can make more than one vowel sound. There are about twenty different vowel sounds, and they can be spelled using over thirty vowel combinations. Often the same diphthong can be used to produce two, or even three, different vowel sounds.

A thousand years ago, almost all English vowels were short. The long vowel sound and the diphthong came, mostly, from imported and borrowed words. Today the majority of our words still contain these short vowels.

To avoid confusion, any vowel sound that is not clearly a short vowel sound should be called long.

When teaching reading to very small children, we often use the old rhyme, “When two vowels go walking, the first does the talking.” The child learns that the first of the two vowels in a diphthong will control the sound and almost always it will be a long vowel sound. Not all diphthongs follow this rule, but a very high percentage do.

C
HAPTER 3

Vowel Plus
r

I
n English spelling, some consonants change the sound of the vowel that precedes them without using the silent
e
.

When the
r
follows a vowel, it almost always creates a new vowel sound and becomes the dominant consonant. Usually, there is a clear pattern, and the student will recognize it quickly. Often, however, the combination of vowel plus
r
can produce more than one sound. When we include diphthongs or the silent
e
, there are more than three dozen possible sounds.

The following are examples of a single vowel preceding an
r
.

In this group of words, the
ar
follows the letters
w
and
qu:

This group of words uses
er:

This group of words uses
ir:

This group of words uses or: