Happy Sunday dear readers! What have you been up to this weekend? I went to see the eclipse on Friday evening in the forest near our house. Then on Saturday we made tomato sauce for pasta! It was fun but a lot of work. I’ll make a separate post to share the photos and experience more in depth.
Today I’d like to address pronunciation. I don’t like to preach about pronunciation too much because there is a world full of native and non-native English-speakers who pronounce things very differently. However, this pronunciation inconsistency changes the tense of the word (simple past) or makes that word hard to understand. So let’s talk about it!
First of all, for an in-depth linguistic explanation and accurate phonetic spelling of the example words, check out this excellent video by Rachel’s English. I do not like to focus too much on specific rules but rather offer broad guidance.
When you conjugate a verb into the simple past or use it as an adjective, you must know how the root word ends so that you can pronounce it correctly. Sometimes you add an extra syllable to the ‘ed,’ and sometimes you just cram it all together and pretend there is no vowel.
If the root word ends in a ‘t’ or ‘d,’ you add an extra syllable when pronouncing the ‘ed.’
- Marketed
- root word (market) ends in a ‘t’
- add the syllable: marketid
- Dreaded
- root word (dread) ends in a ‘d’
- add the syllable: dreadid
If the word ends with any other letter, do not add an extra syllable.
- Liked
- root word (like) ends in a ‘e’
- don’t add the syllable: likt
- Used
- root word (use) ends in a ‘e’
- don’t add the syllable: yoozd
Now it’s time to practice! How do you pronounce these words? (All the words in the examples and the list below were taken directly from the ‘pronunciation’ portion of my students’ feedback documents.
- Marketed
- Stated
- Edited
- Matched
- Used
- Evolved
- Changed
- Filed
- Filled
- Benefited
- Based
- Tweaked
- Received
- Pushed
- Concerned
- Owed
- Traveled
- Planned
- Smoked
- Noticed
Mallory Echols 