Geddy was being naughty at bedtime (fairly typical) so I asked him to please just behave. He very seriously looked at me and said, "But Mommy I am already have".
How many of you read that as just "have", not as the second syllable from behave? Why is "have" pronounced like it is but rave, cave, dave, save, fave, gave, pave, and wave all are pronounced with the long a sound? Come on English majors, help me out here.
3 comments:
English makes absolutely no sense at all! Somewhere i have a great little paper abotu that...I think I got it on my mission from a comp. when we were teaching English classes. I tell Joshua the same thing - English makes absolutely no sense when he asks me a question regarding pronunciation or something...after 18 mo. teaching English in Spain and 5 eyars as an ESL teacher, it still doesn't make sense!!! I'll email you one of Nathaniel's taking things to literally later...love this age!
I'll pass it on to Dave to analize. most likely it's because the words come from different linguistic backgrounds. it's his pet subject now. The only way to make sense of English is to study the old english, germanic and other similar languagest to understand that English is reaelly a meltingpot language.
English is a silly language. Let's face it, what's up with useless letters like X when "eks" could replace it. And we're all about breaking rules for no good reason. No wonder english is so hard for people to learn.
You can tell I'm fiery passionate about this topic :) I just love how Geddy said "I'm already have" :)
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