Quote:
Originally Posted by Urbane Guerrilla
Hmm -- that never limited me, though introduction to silent letters, begging any question of their redundancy, was all through my early reading learning. A silent E modifying a preceding vowel sound was easy enough to master, even such variations as the long-vowel/single phoneme/silent-E as in ache. In my experience, it had no limits at all.
I'm sorry to have offended, but not getting phonics courses is so very much the usual root of spelling troubles as to be the way to bet, and that was the way I did. What do you see around you, should you inquire into this?
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On phonics, the Australian Government recently announced that phonics would be re-introduced into Australian schools. I think this is a good thing, as phonics does work for many of the words that children will encounter in the first year or two of education.
The magic-E spellings (eg: bale, cane) are sound. The only problem I see with these spellings is in those occasional words that have a magic-E spelling but not a magic-E pronunciation. Examples: are
* (the verb), give, have, live (as a verb). In these words the silent e is redundant.
Indeed, the e is redundant in many of the words that end in -ve (words like
active,
passive,
captive,
native where the vowel before the v is short, but not in
cave,
behave,
concave where the e is a regular marker of a preceding long vowel). This spelling convention is an old one, dating from before the introduction of u and v as separate letters. Before this split, u (the miniscule of V) did double duty as vowel and consonant. If it preceded a vowel, it was a consonant, and vice versa. So in those words that ended in a /v/ sound, the letter had to be written as -ue to mark it as a consonant. The convention is still with us today, but now the only apparent use the final -e has in these words ending in a short vowel followed by -ve is to stop the v from falling over.
* The
are (pronounced like "air") is also a metric unit of measurement equal to 100 square metres.