Spelfabet

break great steak Yea Yeats

Eamonn Hargreaves Leahy Reagan Seamus

 

4 responses to “ea as in break”

1. Springbeetle Fox says:

   November 21, 2020 at 3:40 am

   I want learn more about this.

   Reply
   • alison says:

     November 25, 2020 at 8:26 pm

     I’m not sure what else there is to learn. Some words have the sound /e/ spelt ea, because they were originally pronounced more like “ee”. This spelling also helps link them to base words, as in dream/dreamt, leap/leapt, heal/health, steal/stealth etc.

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2. Celia Chrem says:

   December 21, 2022 at 5:49 am

   Hi! If I may mention, the word steak can be added to this! 🙂 I am curious, would the words wear, tear, bear, and pear be considered as the long a sound as EA or is this categorized as EAR pattern?

   Reply
   • alison says:

     December 31, 2022 at 11:37 am

     Hi Celia, steak is already on the list. In my accent (non-rhotic) and sound classification system (I count /air/ and /ear/ as separate sounds because they are diphthongs not triphthongs), ‘wear’, ‘bear’, ‘pear’, ‘tear’ (meaning ‘rip’) and ‘swear’ are the only 5 lemmas with /air/ sound represented by EAR. See https://www.spelfabet.com.au/spelling-lists/sorted-by-sound/air/ear-as-in-bear/. Hope that makes sense. Happy New Year! Alison

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