Sounds and letters
Once upon a time, Man could not read and write. And every child of Man born into this world learns to talk before learning to read and write. Literacy is a wonderful thing, but learning to read and write (at least, the way we do it) makes learning about language more difficult.
Languages are made up of words, and words are made up of sounds, not letters. For instance, take the words sauce and saws. Even children who have not acquired literacy yet can hear the difference between them and use both words correctly. The second consonant (N.B., consonants and vowels are also sounds, not letters) in the first word is a hissy sound, while the second consonant in the second word is a buzzy one. The two sounds are similar, but different. We call these two consonants allophones because they are formed the same way in our mouths, but the buzzy one is voiced (that is, our vocal chords vibrate when we make it) and the hissy one is voiceless (our vocal chords do not vibrate).
Meanwhile the two vowels in the two words are also subtly different. It takes us just a wee bit longer to say the 'aw' of saws than the 'ah' of sauce. Linguists call the 'aw' a "long vowel" and the 'ah' a "short vowel." Confusingly, this is not what most teachers of English mean by long and short vowels, which is an abomination that should be corrected. In addition, the 'aw' of saws is formed just a wee bit farther forward in the mouth than the 'ah' of sauce -- at least, for many people. Is this the same vowel, or a different one? If we pronounced the consonants in the words the same and took the same amount of time to say the vowels, would we be able to identify the two words as different words?
Letters are like musical notes. They are not sounds, but an attempt to represent sounds. There are fewer letters than there are sounds, which is a problem. Some letters, or combinations of letters, are going to have to do double and triple duty. But also, each language that uses our alphabet has borrowed or inherited it from somebody else who spoke a different language, which means that the letters have had to be adapted in their use to represent the sounds of our language. The Alphabet we use to write in English was used to write Latin, whose sounds were very different from English sounds. The Romans adapted it from the Greeks, who adapted it from the Phoenicians. The Phoenicians are often credited with being the inventors of the Alphabet, but they got a lot of the forms from Egyptian. Learning to read requires one to learn something of how the letters have been used over time, since the correspondence of letters to sounds is not immediately obvious.
Finally, we need to note that sound change is an ongoing feature of language. Proto-Indo-European became Proto-Germanic through a series of sound changes. English emerged as a distinct set of dialects different from other Germanic languages through sound changes. English used to sound a lot different from the way it does today. But our spelling became fixed at a particular point in time: not when our language was first written down, but when printing was invented. Now, spelling continues to change, too, though more slowly than speech. Most people write "plow" nowadays, not "plough." But here's the thing: both "plow" and "plough" remain possible variants of the same word, and you may encounter either in your reading.
Most of what I have written here is not how Reading and Spelling are taught to children in our schools. Which means that they have to unlearn a lot of what they "know" if they are to learn more advanced things about their own language later on. Getting people to unlearn things is harder than getting them to learn them right in the first place. And in the meantime, the arguments that are provoked are like the Battle of the Gods and Giants.
Languages are made up of words, and words are made up of sounds, not letters. For instance, take the words sauce and saws. Even children who have not acquired literacy yet can hear the difference between them and use both words correctly. The second consonant (N.B., consonants and vowels are also sounds, not letters) in the first word is a hissy sound, while the second consonant in the second word is a buzzy one. The two sounds are similar, but different. We call these two consonants allophones because they are formed the same way in our mouths, but the buzzy one is voiced (that is, our vocal chords vibrate when we make it) and the hissy one is voiceless (our vocal chords do not vibrate).
Meanwhile the two vowels in the two words are also subtly different. It takes us just a wee bit longer to say the 'aw' of saws than the 'ah' of sauce. Linguists call the 'aw' a "long vowel" and the 'ah' a "short vowel." Confusingly, this is not what most teachers of English mean by long and short vowels, which is an abomination that should be corrected. In addition, the 'aw' of saws is formed just a wee bit farther forward in the mouth than the 'ah' of sauce -- at least, for many people. Is this the same vowel, or a different one? If we pronounced the consonants in the words the same and took the same amount of time to say the vowels, would we be able to identify the two words as different words?
Letters are like musical notes. They are not sounds, but an attempt to represent sounds. There are fewer letters than there are sounds, which is a problem. Some letters, or combinations of letters, are going to have to do double and triple duty. But also, each language that uses our alphabet has borrowed or inherited it from somebody else who spoke a different language, which means that the letters have had to be adapted in their use to represent the sounds of our language. The Alphabet we use to write in English was used to write Latin, whose sounds were very different from English sounds. The Romans adapted it from the Greeks, who adapted it from the Phoenicians. The Phoenicians are often credited with being the inventors of the Alphabet, but they got a lot of the forms from Egyptian. Learning to read requires one to learn something of how the letters have been used over time, since the correspondence of letters to sounds is not immediately obvious.
Finally, we need to note that sound change is an ongoing feature of language. Proto-Indo-European became Proto-Germanic through a series of sound changes. English emerged as a distinct set of dialects different from other Germanic languages through sound changes. English used to sound a lot different from the way it does today. But our spelling became fixed at a particular point in time: not when our language was first written down, but when printing was invented. Now, spelling continues to change, too, though more slowly than speech. Most people write "plow" nowadays, not "plough." But here's the thing: both "plow" and "plough" remain possible variants of the same word, and you may encounter either in your reading.
Most of what I have written here is not how Reading and Spelling are taught to children in our schools. Which means that they have to unlearn a lot of what they "know" if they are to learn more advanced things about their own language later on. Getting people to unlearn things is harder than getting them to learn them right in the first place. And in the meantime, the arguments that are provoked are like the Battle of the Gods and Giants.