I’m trying to figure out what I can do with my life that will benefit the world. Take as a given that I’m good for something, I just have to find or invent it. Two years ago, I started tagging words on Wordnik.com. I wanted to understand the unexpected spelling similarities between words that do not sound like each other. I used C and V to stand in for consonants and vowels in terms of alphabet graphemes, not IPA phonemes. Some linguists got mad. I understand why, but tagging convowels was an important outlet for me at the time, and I don’t regret that I’ve left a mark on wordnik.
The word started me thinking was apple, and I’d like to revisit that VCCCV word pattern tonight. I find that my interest cycle involves writing lists and then abandoning them when completed. Right now I’m going to try to do something with a list, I’m not sure how successful it will be. The words I found that have the same pattern are: alpha, amble, ample, amply, angle, ankle, apple, apply, empty, extra, oddly, oxfly, uncle. In my GenAm accent, this is their broad transcription. ‘-‘ means syllable boundary here, for legibility’s sake.
Alpha æl-fə
Amble æm-bəl
Ample æm-pəl
Amply æm-pli
Angle eŋ-gəl
Ankle eŋ-kəl
Apple æ-pəl
Apply ə-plɑɪ
Empty ɛm-ti
Extra ɛk-stɹə
Oddly ɒ-dli
Oxfly ɒks-flɑɪ
Uncle ʌŋ-kəl
So nothing brilliant, but a few things:
- All of these words are stressed on the first syllable except for apply.
- 3 words are just a vowel in the first syllable: apple, apply, and oddly. Another accent may put odd & ly together, but for me the [d] is influenced by the [l] and has a lateral release, I don’t think I can separate them.
- 8 of the 13 words start with a, but only 5 start with [æ] like in cat.
- There are minimal pairs: amble/ample, ankle/angle, ankle/uncle.
- Alpha comes from Greek, apple, empty, ankle, and ox are from O.E., odd is from O.N., the rest originate in Latin.
- I’ve written about uncle before.
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
I’m wondering about ‘y’ in your system. so would ‘your’ be CVVC and ‘system’ be CVCCVC ? What about ‘day’ ?
I struggled with words like ‘key’ in my first go-round. My short answer is: in most of the words I was trying to learn about, this wasn’t an issue. It’s fairly clear if it’s functioning as a vowel or a consonant in the word. in Day, the ‘y’ makes the ‘a’ a long vowel. day instead of dam. It’s not a perfect system. I mean, rhythm, historically, counts m as a vowel, but on wordnik i wrote that word as CCVCCC. It’s a pretty cool list: http://www.wordnik.com/words/ccvccc.