Why do you have to add an extra letter before adding -ed for the past tense for certain words? Stop, becomes stopped

Question

Why do you have to add an extra letter before adding -ed for the past tense for certain words? Stop, becomes stopped

In: 6

Answer 1

Because in many cases, having two consonants (those hard sounds like “k”, “p”, “s”, “t”, etc.) next to each other makes the vowel (open mouth sounds of a, e, i, o, u) a *short* sound instead of a *long* sound.

“Stoped” would not sound like “stopped” does, it would sound like “stoh-ped” (rhyming with “soaped”). To maintain that “ah” sound, they add the second p.