7

The pronunciation of blood is \'bləd\ while words such as moon and spoon (with double 'o') are pronounced as \ˈmün\ and \ˈspün.

Why isn't blood pronounced like \ˈblüd\ ?

tchrist
  • 134,759
  • 1
    There are also "brood" and "loot", which are both pronounced with "ü" – John Dvorak Dec 13 '13 at 07:45
  • 1
    /muːn/ and /spuːn/ - /uː/ ːit's a long back vowel sound (Br English) hence the /ː/ after the symbol of the vowel sound. In modern English flood /flʌd/ is also pronounced like blood /blʌd/. – None Dec 13 '13 at 08:25
  • @JanDvorak: like "goose" and "choose" and most English words with a double "o" in their spelling. But not all, "good" is another exception to the /uː/ sound, it's has a short back vowel sound: /ɡʊd/. – None Dec 13 '13 at 08:34
  • Why don't hearth and earth rhyme? Or said and maid? – J.R. Dec 13 '13 at 11:25
  • From ELL's perspective, the simple answer is "the pronunciation of English words isn't particularly related to how they are spelled". Consequently I think this would be a better fit on ELU where they can discuss the etymology of the word. – Matt Dec 13 '13 at 17:04
  • Because spelling is chaotic. There actually are reasons though. – Mitch Dec 13 '13 at 18:33
  • 1
    What with all the backslashes and non/sub/anti-standard markings? Standard phonemics would be /blʌd/. – tchrist Dec 13 '13 at 22:00

2 Answers2

8

Many vowel pairs have more than one sound

  • oo has at least three: hoot, hood, flood.
  • ou has at least three: pound, soup, double.
  • ea has at least three: peal, bread, break. (In fact, the word read uses two of these: I read a book yesterday; I will read another book tomorrow.)

This gets even more varied when the vowel pair precedes an r or gh

  • Consider poor, earn, pear, court, scour
  • When ou is followed by gh, things get ridiculously varied: thought, though, through, tough, cough, bough

Let's not forget about when w functions as a vowel

  • That's why words like bow and row rhyme with BOTH know and now. ("Tie a bow, then take a bow," for example).

Some of these pronunciations vary by region

  • In the U.S., some areas of the country pronounce "route" as a homophone of "root" (which rhymes with "toot"), while others pronounce it as a homophone of "rout" which rhymes with "out").
Community
  • 1
J.R.
  • 58,828
  • 5
  • 95
  • 196
  • 3
    the oo in hood is different than the one in foot? News to me. – Hellion Dec 13 '13 at 17:30
  • Yeah, this is a great answer (+1!) but I agree with @Hellion that I've never heard hood and foot pronounced with a different vowel sound. – WendiKidd Dec 13 '13 at 18:34
  • @Hellion - Nope; I pronounce them the same, too. Just a mix-up when I was picking my examples. Thanks for pointing that out. – J.R. Dec 13 '13 at 18:58
  • One of those things where I couldn't really be sure if it was a mistake, or a genuine regional thing I'm just not in the right region for.... :-) (I'd already +1'd you anyway.) – Hellion Dec 13 '13 at 19:01
3

An attempt to a historical explanation could be found in the Great Vowel Shift. Before the Great Vowel Shift that started around the 14th century "oo" was pronounced [oː] and it then evolved into [uː], see chart. Evolution continued and some words evolved in different ways and are now pronounced differently. But as to why they have evolved differently I expect we can only make guesses. About "flood" and "blood", nowadays pronounced with a short /ʌ/ we know that at one point in time they both used to be spelt respectively floud and bloud, could that be a reason why their pronunciations have evolved in a similar manner?

You might find those posts on linguistics.stackexchange interesting:
https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/questions/2085/how-do-linguists-determine-at-which-point-the-great-vowel-shift-was-complete
https://linguistics.stackexchange.com/a/4181/637

or this page on the internet in addition to the one given in my first paragraph:
http://marymoore2012.weebly.com/1/post/2013/04/english-as-a-global-language-great-vowel-shift.html

and this page from The History of English Spelling

Community
  • 1
None
  • 4,216