Phonics 'i' in climb

[Tiggles]

Mind went completely blank when DS was reading 'climb' earlier. He worked out it said climb, but then asked why isn't it spelt 'clime'. I can think of lots of other words like find, mind, rind etc where the i makes an 'eye' sound without an i-e, but they all end 'ind'. Are there any others similar to climb that I can point out the pattern to him?

Just asked super intelligent husband. Here we go:

dumb, thumb, numb, bomb, comb, not "imb", but same silent "b"
limb- different sound for i though, lamb

so, the b is silent, but there doesn't seem to be a general rule, there are lots of different vowel sounds with the b.

Perhaps someone else will enlighten us, interesting though!

tomb, womb

The b is silent but then so are the other 25 letters of the alphabet

the sound m can be written m- mm- mb - mn (which school will teach usually in Y1)

the letter i can represent the sound i in fin and the ie in find

I'm afraid it's one of those things we have to deal with in our spelling system that some other languages don't have to worry about. Try "i" if it doesn't sound right try "ie".

surely it's i as in I ?

also like the I in FIND, MIND, RIND,

Kind

The b was pronounced in Old English, fwiw, but endings are the first sounds to go when you get language contact (e.g. between the Anglo-Saxons and the Vikings). Spellings tend to hang around a lot longer than pronunciation - hence knife, etc. The past tense of climb used to be clomb too - not sure exactly when it changed to climbed.