why some vowles are sounded out different from others? ie: the ‘oh’ in Over vs ‘uh’ in Oven
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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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