Why We have Vowels With all of the clear distinctions between vowels and consonants, you might wonder what vowels are actually used for. Why do we bother making the distinction? The main reason that vowels exist
Why Vowels Are the Most Import This may not be a word-for-word transcript. Vowels... We use them every day, but how much do we really know about them? In the English language, we have five specific vowel letters, each with its own unique personality. First off on this linguistic A...
One does not have to look very hard to find examples of apostrophes being manhandled and put into places where we today would consider them inappropriate. This does not mean that the people who used them thusly were uneducated (see: Jane Austen and Thomas Jefferson), but instead shows us th...
we need it most. These attributes push us forward when that physical ability sometimes wants to call it quits. Or maybe it’s even more simple than that. Whenever I ask myself why I do this, I hear that beautiful running shoe on gravel voice of Bruce Springsteen, ‘’Baby, we were ...
When it comes to learning English, we all have our pet hates. Some of us struggle with learning new vocabulary; some of us just can’t get the grammar rules that seem to change for every verb conjugation; and some of us really struggle with pronunciation. “My mouth just doesn’...
where the teacher helps learners connect with muscles to do something other than their usual habitual movement. When learning pronunciation we have to use our inner sense of what our muscles are doing. This is not based on cognitive knowledge, butphysicalorkinaestheticknowledg...
If you do not hear a word, clearly you can still understand the world because of the policy of the strength. Remember two very simple rules about what stress. One word has only one stress. And we can only stressed vowels, not consonants. Listen to the following phrases carefully and mark...
the 16th century Italians pronouncedghettoas we do. The Spanish and Portuguese exiles could have used the formjetto. Yet even if they did, this circumstance is of no consequence for the etymology ofghetto. Thegh–gdifference is the main stumbling block in the etymology that tracesghettoto the...
We don’t do that kind of thing any more: too old. Once you hit your thirties, you have to start worrying about your knees. We compared the scenes to the George Floyd protests last summer: back then, the streets were full of people who’d never been on a march before; they didn’...
The written form of the language doesn’t use an alphabet as most European languages do. Nor does it use an Arabic-style abjad (which is a bit like an alphabet with the vowels omitted) or a Japanese-style syllabary (where each character stands for a different syllable). Rather, the char...