Hey and Happy Quarantine!! I have a phonics question for you.

Question

How come the "char" in the words chariness and charcoal are pronounced differently?

How come the "e" in the word cachinnate is silent? So, instead of (kak-u-nate) its pronounced (kak-u-neht)?

My thinking process when I see a new word is

1. break it down into syllables (aka look for all the vowels)
2. Step one should give me an idea of how to say the word
3. For the word cachinnate, I initially broke it down into cach-i-nnate

because of this break down, I really couldn't figure out how to say the word.

I get nervous saying words I've never seen before, so I'm asking a lot of questions to try and keep working at it.

Answer 1

 Hello Cedisha, English does have phonics rules, but there are always exceptions to the rules. Sometimes words of foreign origin also have different pronunciations. I would recommend online dictionaries such as dictionary.com that have a button you click on to hear the pronunciation. First, I'll explain the silent "e" in cachinnate. This is often called the "silent e rule." "When one vowel is followed by a single consonant and "e," the vowel is pronounced with its long sound (it's name, "a" in this case) and the "e" is silent. You can see this in many short words, fate, bite, mole, etc. Second, the "ch" of chariness is pronounced the same as the "ch" of charcoal, at least according to the online Cambridge dictionary. This could possibly vary according to the different dialects of English, for example, in British English. Hope this helps.

Answer 2

I completely agree with Julie’s answer above.

The ‘char’ part of the word is different because where the syllable is split is different.

char-coal and Cha-ri-ness

In a VCCV (vowel consonant consonant vowel) set up you split between the two consonants. So for charcoal the r goes with the first syllable and the c with the second.

In a VCV set up the consonant most often goes to the second syllable. So for chariness the r goes to the second syllable (same with the n later in the word).

I hope this helps. Unfortunately there are lots of words which break the rules in English as it takes elements from many other languages.