Phonics rules were 88.4% accurate for consonants, but only 41.5% accurate for vowels.A question I have always struggled to ...

A, E, I, O, U and sometimes Y is not all you need to know about vowels. There's more to these workhorse members of our linguistics inventory than you might think. The most common vowel sound in ...

I’m Herbert from Germany. Throughout my whole life speaking English, I did not realize that some vowels in words are “swallowed,” like in the words “vegetable,” “family” and “difference.” First, let’s ...

Does [a:] as in 'baa' sound more green or more red? And is [i:] as in 'beet' light or dark in color? Even though we perceive speech and color are perceived with different sensory organs, nearly ...

Sound doesn’t fossilize. Language doesn’t either. Even when writing systems have developed, they’ve represented full-fledged and functional languages. Rather than preserving the first baby steps ...