why some vowles are sounded out different from others? ie: the ‘oh’ in Over vs ‘uh’ in Oven
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Every word has its own history. Over is Germanic and Latin mix. It combines the Germanic word *ove* with the Latin word *super.* Oven is entirely Germanic. The original Old English word is *ofen*. So, these words were spelled differently—ov and of. So that explains why they have different sounds. The spelling of the words changed to what they are now, but might have stayed closer to their original pronunciations.
English has always had a lot more than five different vowel sounds, so when medieval monks first began writing English using Latin letters (designed by Romans for Romans) they had to use the same symbol for more than one sound. There just weren’t enough vowel letters in the alphabet for every sound to get its own letter.
Since then there have been countless changes in pronunciation and in spelling – and it doesn’t help that some of the spelling changes weren’t applied consistently and others were a case of “*Iland* has an S in Latin so it should be written *Island* even though we don’t say it that way in English”. But the underlying problem is that we have more sounds than letters. Maybe if those monks had designed a new alphabet to write English documents, things would be different.
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