Pre-Kindergarten diphthong analysis

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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