Re: Pre-Kindergarten diphthong analysis

In kindergarten I was deeply offended to find that my teacher considered the
vowel sound in "can" to be different from that in "pet"; they weren't for ME!
So I have the utmost sympathy for your son's skepticism.

----- Original Message -----
From: "Mark J. Reed" <markjreed@...>
Date: Thursday, September 18, 2008 8:39 am
Subject: [CHAT] Pre-Kindergarten diphthong analysis
To: CONLANG@LISTSERV.BROWN.EDU

> For school today my 4-year-old had to bring in a picture of something
> starting with the letter O.  Having learned that "O says [a]" ([a]
> being the sound of CLOTH in our 'lect), he immediately thought of
> "octopus".  But that seems to be the standard O word in alphabet books
> these days, so my wife thought that too many kids were liable to bring
> one of those in.  So we set about thinking of other things that start
> with O.
>
> I suggested "owl", but he sounded it out and informed me that "owl"
> starts with [&] and therefore would be spelled with the letter
> "A"!  I
> had to agree that [&] is indeed the first component of our MOUTH
> diphthong, but I pointed out that we have had discussions before about
> how spelling doesn't always work the way you think it should.  He
> remained skeptical.
>
> We compromised on "orange".  He was still iffy - we're in the
> [O`r\.@ndZ] camp rather than, say, the [a.r\@ndZ] camp, and NORTH is
> not CLOTH, but it was closer than that crazy "owl" idea.
>
> I did try to think of other words besides "octopus" that are spelled
> with O and start with the CLOTH sound, but of course under the
> pressure of trying to get ready to go to school, couldn't think of
> any.  Naturally, after I dropped him off I had ocelots and oxen
> chasing ostriches and otters through my head...
>
> Anyway, I'm proud of my boy's phonetic analysis, if not his spelling
> ability.   I'll make a linguist of him yet. :)
>
> --
> Mark J. Reed <markjreed@...>
>

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