Proper pronunciation

Question

what are the rules for pronunciationof any english word

Mr Wordy · Accepted Answer

That question is far too big to be answered here.

CalifJim · Answer

Anonymous~~what~~ What are the rules for pronunciation
of any ~~english~~ English word?

I once tried to list these, but never finished.

There are at least 322 rules and at least 1458 exceptions, so the format of this forum does not really lend itself to answering such a big question.

Among the first 10 rules are the pronunciation of "oo", "ood", and "ook". Rule 14 deals with the pronunciation of initial "wr". Rules 20 and 22 deal with the very short words in the series "he, we, me" and "so, no". Rules 69 and 70 deal with the pronunciation of ai, ei, ay, and ey. Rules 89 and 90 deal with the pronunciations of "augh". Rule 161 deals with the pronunciations of the prefix "ex-". Rules 267 - 271 deal with three groups of three-syllable words with 'orthographically tense' finals. Rule 290 deals with schwa deletion before "r". Rules 309 - 316 deal with stress patterns in compound words like "haystack". And so on, and so on.
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The shorter answer is this: To determine the pronunciation of any English word, use the dictionary.

CJ

Raindoctor · Answer

CJ, you can publish your rules as an ebook. There are some books that also deal with similar problems. For instance, Masha Bell's "Rules and exceptions of English spelling" does a similar job.

"Although 80 of the 91 basic English spelling rules get broken in at least the 228 different ways, as shown in the post Rules and exceptions of English spelling, the total number of English graphemes (letters or letter strings used for a sound) is only 185."
from Masha's blog http://englishspellingproblems.blogspot.com/

The stress placement is another key factor in deciding which pronunciation is preferred: for instance, February has the suffix -ary, which gets the secondary stress; and this secondary stress dictates where the primary stress falls, etc. Same with many other suffixes. One can also explain variation of pronounciations for words like February: /r/ dissimilation explains the version of Febyuary.

CalifJim · Answer

Thanks for the info, raindoctor.

CJ

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