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The Story of 7R-Block 2 Apr 2008 | 02:55 am
Setting: at an upscale restaurant taking a customer's order, we now get to the drinks. Me: And what would you like to drink? Customer: "7R-Block." Thoughts ran through my head: What the heck is tha...
More digraphs: TH and WH 29 Mar 2008 | 01:56 am
The TH sound Continuing on the topic of digraphs, "th" is a example of a digraph that is used very frequently in English. There are two kinds of th sounds in English. What follows will be the IPA sym...
2 letters, 1 sound: Digraphs 22 Feb 2008 | 04:07 am
Two letters (in written form) can represent a single sound. These are known as digraphs. You probably know them as ch, sh, th, and the like. English doesn't have a single letter to represent the init...
Vowels and musical languages 10 Feb 2008 | 04:13 am
Even though we only write 5 vowels, English has as many as 15 vowel sounds! (this can vary depending on dialect) What's useful about the consonants and vowels of a language? Although French has nasa...
Consonants and Vowels 23 Jan 2008 | 03:39 am
What's the difference between a consonant and a vowel? In grade school, I'm pretty sure you've been taught that there are 5 vowels: AEIOU. The rest are consonants. However, this distinction fails to ...
Xmas 22 Dec 2007 | 02:35 am
(Ok, I lied, one more holiday themed post before I take a break :)) Why do we use the abbreviation Xmas for Christmas? It originates from the Greek letter chi, which looks similar to an X. Since thi...
Untitled 15 Dec 2007 | 02:38 am
Putting this on hold for now, apologies for no new posts. I am quite busy at the moment and won't be able to make any more posts for a while. There will be more topics on phonetics soon to come.
Phonetics 15 Nov 2007 | 02:28 am
The study of human speech sounds is called phonetics. Phonetic alphabets are used to represent the sounds we speak. Words can have more letters than sounds and vice versa. In English, what is written...
Sounds vs. spelling 22 Oct 2007 | 11:50 pm
Pronunciation is not predictable in English. It may be more predictable in other languages, but there are many situations in English where the same sequence of letters can make a different sound altog...
Same word, opposite meaning 9 Oct 2007 | 12:04 am
There exist many words whose meanings are opposites of themselves. You may ask, How can a word be an antonym of itself? Through polysemy and homonymy, a word that is pronounced or spelled the same wa...
