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According my second grade teacher, when you have an e in your word, the letter 'one skip' behind it is pronounced hard. For example, the word name. In 'name', the fourth letter is e, the letter behind it is m, and the second letter is a. Because a is just past e, it is a hard a, pronounced aye.

I am following this rule, ergo, are should be pronounced aye-r, right? I've been stuck on this for a while now.

choster
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    You shouldn't try to deduce the pronunciation of a word from rules if you can help it, because many rules have exceptions. Dictionaries provide information about the pronunciation of words. A dictionary doesn't have the authority to tell you how you "should" pronounce something, but it's not really clear what you mean here by "should". – herisson May 11 '18 at 22:44
  • The "rule" about open and closed syllables is a guideline only, and it only maybe 80% accurate, for a normal collection of English words. – Hot Licks May 11 '18 at 22:45
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    Your teacher is wrong on a very basic level. Letters are never pronounced at all. It's spoken sounds that get written down. And the letters encode not just the pronunciation but a great deal of other things, like etymology for starters. Which is why you cannot, ever, deduce pronunciation from spelling. Not in English, not in any other language. That said, if you're going to come up with rules of thumb for English, "r" makes for a special case. It screws with all the vowels. We have a question somewhere covering this in great detail. Let me check. – RegDwigнt May 11 '18 at 22:45
  • (It's really a guide to use when "sounding out" a word you're not familiar with, while reading some volume of text. If you must know the correct pronunciation, use a dictionary.) – Hot Licks May 11 '18 at 22:46
  • @RegDwigнt - Actually, Spanish comes fairly close. – Hot Licks May 11 '18 at 22:47
  • Welcome to EL&U. The pronunciation of are varies depending on whether the dialect is rhotic (e.g. U.S. "General American") or non-rhotic (e.g. U.K. "Received Pronunciation"), but can be found in any quality dictionary: the same as the letter R, the same vowel as in bar. There are no reliable rules when it comes to English spelling, only some patterns for which there can be as many exceptions as there are examples; indeed, aye is pronounced the same as the letter I (/aɪ/), the same vowel as in right, whereas the vowel in name is /eɪ/. – choster May 11 '18 at 22:50
  • @RegDwigнt Not in any other language'? Not even in, say, German? – linguisticturn May 11 '18 at 22:51
  • Yes. If you know some Spanish, you probably think that it comes fairly close. If you know some German, you will say it comes extremely close. If you know Romanian, you'll insist that spelling is pronunciation. And if you don't know Chinese, you'll think that it's 0%. And in all cases you'd be wrong. That some systems, by design, do come closer than others, is not my point. My point is that no system, again by design, comes close enough. – RegDwigнt May 11 '18 at 22:53
  • @linguisticturn I am a native speaker of German. Go ahead, make my day. Predict the pronunciation of "Soest" for me. Or "Grevenbroich". Or "Höschen". Or "Pankow". Or "Computer", for that matter. Or "Action" or "fair" or "Game". All German words, mind. Good luck. :-D – RegDwigнt May 11 '18 at 22:56
  • @RegDwigнt OK, fair enough. :) – linguisticturn May 11 '18 at 22:59
  • @linguisticturn the thing is, the German orthography, just like other orthographies, fails to account for two very basic things: morpheme borders and stress. You don't know if it's "Hös-chen" or "Hösch-en", and you don't know if the stress is on the ö or the e. If the E is stressed, it's probably an /e/ alright, but if it isn't it could be reduced to a schwa or swallowed altogether. Or maybe it's still an /e/. Or maybe it's a loan word and it's actually an /i/. And then on top of all that you have dialects and registers. "Chemie" could be "Chemie", or "Kemie", or "Schemie". Sucks, I know. – RegDwigнt May 11 '18 at 23:05
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    Guess what? Not everything you were taught in second grade is correct. How much would you trust an engineer who last studied math in second grade? There is actually a bit more to learn. – John Lawler May 11 '18 at 23:50
  • @RegDwigнt Yes, all of that is fair... I was going to put the issue of stress aside, but even then, your point of course stands. I just don't remember ever encountering such words in my German as a Second Language classes. So on the one hand, I don't think there is any doubt that, on the whole, German orthography is far more systematic than English. But on the other hand, yes, I do now see there are some words whose pronunciations are quite unpredictable from how they're spelled. – linguisticturn May 12 '18 at 05:31
  • @linguisticturn there's also those pesky homographs that are heteronyms. In English they mostly have to do with stress, like désert/desért, or all the initial-stress-derived nouns (áddress/addréss, áccess/accéss), which mostly affects the vowels, but in German you have things like "Star" loaned from English and pronounced "star" vs "Star" as in the German word for startling, pronounced "shtar". And then there's the classical example of "ausgepowert", which comes from French "pauvre", but people now think it comes from English "power", so both its pronunciation and meaning have totally changed. – RegDwigнt May 14 '18 at 18:45

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