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affair
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3 responses to “air as in hair”
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Hi Alison,
We have been teaching ‘air’ to our Y3 and Y4 students and I have been thinking about the place of the ‘r’. Fair and dairy are different in that the ‘r’ is pronounced in dairy ahead of the long e sound of the y grapheme. Doesn’t that mean that the grapheme for the /air/ phoneme in dairy should be ‘ai’ and not ‘air’? Same with parent, wouldn’t the grapheme be ‘a’ and not ‘ar’? I am not saying I am right, just seeking your thoughts. And yes, dipthongs are tricky and ‘r’ is a semi-vowel.
Hi Adrian, yes, you’re absolutely right, consonant letters at the end of a vowel grapheme tend to be pronounced if the next sound is a vowel (except the ‘w’ in words like ‘sawing’ and ‘). In the word ‘fair’ in my accent, there are two sounds, written in phonetic script as /fɛə/, because the vowel is a diphthong, but in the word ‘fairy’ there are four sounds, transcribed /ˈfɛəri/, because the consonant /r/ is pronounced to separate the two vowels. I need to go back through all my wordlists and check that they are correct on this, and fix up things like ‘parent’ and ‘canary’. However, this isn’t just something that happens within words, the /r/ in “I don’t care about that” is pronounced because it’s followed by a vowel, but when the word after “care” starts with a consonant (e.g. “I don’t care for that”), there’s no need for an /r/ sound. We’re struggling with this now as we try to code common words for our decodable text writing interface. Even speech pathologists suffer from orthographic interference, it seems. Thanks for raising this and good on you for getting your students to listen to and feel the sounds in their own mouths. All the best, Alison
… and ‘r’ can be a semi-vowel. (I meant to say).
Adrian