English is so confusing!
Originally published at Acorns to Oaktrees. You can comment here or there.
I discovered a
(to me) website: Omniglot. They show a bunch of different alphabets and/or writing systems. They also give a pronunciation guide. The pronunciation guide is for British English, so it doesn’t quite match my California English. Here is an example that seems the same in British English and Californian English:
ai - dive [daIv], aisle [aIl], guy [gaI], might [maIt], rye [ɹaI]
I would pronounce all those “aI“s as a long i. ī is the symbol that I learned for this sound. That’s supposed to be a lower case I with a dash over it.
All those different spellings, and the list doesn’t include the word “I”, all with the same sound. It seems like a miracle that native speakers learn to read and write it.