phonics experts -come and settle an argument

[sausagesandwich34]

scone it's an oldy but a goody!

pronounced to rhyme with cone or gone?

does the magic 'e' come into play?

does the magic 'e' even exist anymore?

which it clearly doesn't unless you say erth (which I don't.) out of interest how do you pronounce Earth learnandsay (and how do you pronounce learn andsay)

Rhymes with birth.

so erth

er words are erratic, Errol, Erasmus.

ergo learn to rhyme with burn, fern, girn ...

"No we wouldn't. What on earth makes you think that?"

Because quite clearly, we don't all pronounce things in the same way.

Therefore, if you change spelling to more closely follow pronunciation, you will very quickly run into problems.

In what accent do birth and earth not rhyme? I am genuinely curious.

The ur sound in earth sound like the one at the start of urban and urgent.

See scone, above.

The ur sound in earth sound like the one at the start of urban and urgent. and does that sound different to the er sound in error or the ir in irksome or the ear sound in early?

I think Celia Johnson would probably have said 'eth'. But then she might also have said 'beth'.

Because quite clearly, we don't all pronounce things in the same way.

Therefore, if you change spelling to more closely follow pronunciation, you will very quickly run into problems.

There is no obligation for you to pronounce a word according to its spelling. You pronounce words according to your accent and the commonly accepted pronunciation used by people around you. This is what, in part, produces the phenomena which lands is moaning about of one spelling representing more than one sound and one sound being spelled more than one way.

The difficulty with reforming spelling would be the question of which accent to 'respell' to and the probability that millions of English speakers world wide no being able to understand the respelled word because they would associate a completely different 'sound' with a particular grapheme.

Just look at the heavy weather everyone is making here of the pronunciation of 'er'.

(personally, I'd go for 'er' being the same sound as the 'er' in 'her' and having common alternative spellings of 'ir', 'ur' and 'ear'. I'd also say that the 'er' at the begining of 'error,' errand' etc is spelling two sounds /e/ [as in 'leg'] and /r/)

Sorry, sentence about English speakers in prev. message is very garbled; too much over correction

Her sounds like hur, rhymes with purr and ur is the u sound and r.

so you say "u" as in up and "r" as in rat?

No, the u sound is the one in the middle of the word surge or at the beginning of urge. The u sound at the beginning of up is different.

But the middle sound in surge isn't "u" it is "ur"

It's a vowel digraph, two letters representing a single sound

ur is u and r

r isn't a vowel.

ur is u and r if they were you would say "u" as in cup and "r" as in rabbit not "ur" as in surge

no but u is

Lots of letters sound different in different words. Nobody can say this letter always sounds like this regardless of which words they choose as examples. What I'm saying is that the u in urge has the same sound as the ea at the beginning of earth.

But that's what I meant Maisie - which accent would you decide was the right accent? It would only work if we all spoke the same way. I'm not advocating that people change their accents. I am pointing out the pit falls of changing spelling rules.

after both of them comes the sound r