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Letter E in the open syllable

Typical Spelling Patterns for Vowel Sounds

Spelling and pronunciation are closely connected to each other and should be always studied together.

There are six vowel letters in English: A, E, I, O, U, Y. The letter Y can represent the vowel sounds [i], [ai] (mystery, type), and the consonant (semivowel) sound [y] (yes). Together, vowel letters represent from 15 to 22 vowel sounds. This difference mostly comes from counting the diphthongs differently in British and American English. Generally, American linguists list five diphthongs: [ei], [ai], [au], [oi], [ou].

So, the number of vowel sounds represented by vowel letters and their combinations with other vowels and with certain consonants is larger than the number of vowel letters, which means that one and the same vowel letter or letter combination can represent more than one sound. English also has several spelling variants for each vowel sound, which means that the same vowel sound is represented by different letters and letter combinations in writing.

For example, the letter A typically represents five sounds as in Kate [keit], cat [kat], call [ko:l], card [ka:rd], alone [ә'loun]. Its common open-syllable sound [ei] is represented in writing not only by the letter A as in "Kate", but by five different vowel combinations as in "may, rain, weigh, they, break". Further, the combinations EI, EY which are usually pronounced [ei] in English words, can represent the sound [ai] in the words of foreign origin: Einstein, geyser. There is also a connection between a sound, its spelling and the surrounding letters. For example, the combination AR, which is normally pronounced [a:r] as in "car, park, hard", is pronounced [o:r] after the consonant W, for example: war, ward, warm, warn.

The most practical approach is to learn typical spelling patterns for vowel sounds. The other spelling variants may be present only in a couple of words or in the words that are not used very often.

The material below covers typical spelling patterns for English vowel sounds, proceeding from the sound to spelling. If it is more convenient for you to proceed from the letters and letter combinations to the sounds that they represent, you can reorganize this material according to your wish. An example how to do it is given in the file Method 2 in the section Phonetics.

1. Sound [i:]

Spelling examples: me, Pete, Japanese, equal, rewrite, seem, read, piece, seize, police.

Letter E in the open syllable

The sound [i:] is represented by the letter E in the open syllable of the root: me, be, he, she, we; Pete, eve, these, theme, scene, complete, intervene.

The sound [i:] is represented by the letter E in the open syllable of the suffix: Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese, Maltese, Portuguese, Lebanese, Burmese, manganese.