Why aren’t there words with triple consecutive letters

Question

We have words with 2 consecutive letters like book, deep, wall, etc. Why aren’t there words with 3 consecutive letters, let’s say boook, deeep, etc. Why is 2 the maximum?

In: 0

Answer 1

A “word” is spoken. What’s written is a representation of the word. English is pretty notorious for having the most confusing and irrational connection between it’s written and spoken forms. Though I thought the bough fell into the slough, it was too tough. But it did make me cough….

In many languages, the spoken length of vowels and consonants is “phonemic”. In other words, a long vowel or consonant changes the meaning if that letter is a short vowel. Anyone who is a fan of hockey will have heard multiple Finnish names, and seen the odd spelling. That’s a big part of the reason. Estonian, which is much like Finnish, has single , double, and triple length vowels and consonants, where the meaning is different for each length.

In English, length is, almost entirely, not phonemic. In some dialects, it is. Consider a very proper Englishman telling somebody “I’d love to but I can’t.” Focus on how that Englishman would pronounce the word “can’t”. Then think of what the word would mean if the vowel sound was shorter.

Somebody gave the example of “freeest”, which would usually be spelled “free-est”. While it is written with three e’s, that isn’t how it is spoken: it’s “free-yust”. Other words that rhyme with it are spelled differently: theist, or beist (a dialectal conjugation of to be heard in northern England).

All that is a long way of saying that, as double-length is not phonemic, neither is triple length, so there is no need to spell something that doesn’t exist in the actual language as it is spoken.

One note: be and bee are pronounced the same. The extra “e” is added to the noun to identify the meaning that is absent in the word as pronounced. The context is what shows the meaning in the spoken form.

Another note: fed and feed have different vowel sounds. The double letter doesn’t indicate double length to distinguish meaning, it points the way to a different vowel sound.