When I was in fifth class in which I started learning the spellings and pronunciation of English words, my English teacher used to tweak my ear for mispronouncing the word 'hood'. I used to pronounce hood with a long u – something like /hoood/ instead of /hud/. My budding mind, as in the case of any children, thought all the words with ‘oo’ should be pronounced in the same way as in food, fool, noon, mood, soon, moon, loo etc.
Crazily enough, while a number of common words like moon, food, noon, broom, zoom, boon, proof, roof etc are pronounced with a long ‘u’ sound, so many other words with the same pattern take only a short ‘u’ in pronunciation e.g. book, cook, hood, look, wood, foot and so on.
If you think that the confusion is over just after learning these two rules, what about the words like ‘door’ and ‘floor’? Though they follow the same pattern of spelling, the pronunciation is different!
Is that all? Wait! A fourth small group of words (thank God, only two words in this category!) behaves in a totally different way: blood and flood. The ‘oo’ in them rhymes with the ‘u’ in ‘mud’ ‘thud’ and ‘dull’ !
Isn’t English crazy? Please comment…
2 comments:
Your work is impressive, please keep it up.
Its being very helpful for me... Thanks a lot
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