Spelfabet

beard blear clear dear drear ear fear gear hear near rear sear shear smear spear tear year

appear disappear dreary endear reappear weary

3 responses to “ear as in hear”

1. Stacey says:

   July 18, 2021 at 1:46 pm

   Hi there,

   I am wondering whether you’d call this pattern a trigraph or a digraph ending in r? I’ve found evidence of both but wanted to know what is grammatically correct for Australia. I also wondered if you’d call ough and augh a tetragraph/quadraph? I am wanting to use correct terms with my students but not sure what to use. Alternatively, would you just refer to these as letter patterns in a primary school context for the purpose of simplicity?

   Stacey.

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   • alison says:

     July 19, 2021 at 11:46 am

     Hi Stacey, I treat ‘ear’ and ‘air’ as three-letter spellings, but you’re right, they are really /ee/ plus schwa and /e/ plus schwa, so it’s possible to treat them as two sounds. That’s what books from America do, as they pronounce those final letter Rs as /r/, but we pronounce them as unstressed vowels. We have other vowel sounds that are diphthongs, meaning they involve movement from one vowel to another (/ae/ as in take, /ie/ as in time, /oe/ as in home), so I decided to treat ‘ear’ and ‘air’ as diphthongs represented by a single grapheme, whereas I treat combinations of three sounds like the ‘ire’ in fire, ‘our’ in sour and ‘ure’ in ‘pure’ as two separate sounds (a diphthong and a schwa). So the answer is, you could treat them as either, it depends how finely you want to slice sounds and letters, but I decided it was simpler in our accent to treat ‘ear’ and ‘air’ as separate sounds mostly represented by trigraphs (ear as in dear, eer as in beer, ier as in pier, ere as in here, and then air as in hair, are as in care, ere as in there, eir as in their, etc). I usually avoid terms like ‘trigraph’ and ‘quadgraph’ or ‘tetragraph’, some people have objections to them that are well-grounded in linguistics, and anyway for kids it’s just simpler to say ‘three-letter spelling’ and ‘four-letter spelling’. Hope that makes sense! Alison

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2. Prakhyaat says:

   October 30, 2023 at 4:32 pm

   Thanks for all the lists!

   Reply