scarce

adversarial

aquarium

arbitrary

area

barbarian

barest

baring

blaring

canary

caries

caring

Carpentaria

comparing

contrarily

daring

declaring

dictionary

garish

glaring

harem

hilarious

January

librarian

literary

malaria

Mary

multifarious

nefarious

nightmarish

Ontario

parent

paring

planetarium

precarious

preparing

proletarian

Raratonga

rarefy

rarest

raring

rosemary

Sagittarius

Sanitarium

scariest

scary

secretariat

sharing

solarium

sparing

squarish

staring

temporarily

Tipperary

transparent

vary

vegetarian

vicarious

voluntarily

wary

wayfarer

 

4 responses to “ar as in parent”

  1. Michelle says:

    Hi Alison,

    I am just wondering if you could provide a little more information about this list.
    In the word ‘scarce’, I understand that it would be segmented as [s][c][ar][ce] (/s/ /k/ /ɛə/ /s/). However, when I was looking in Macquarie dictionary it says that a word such as ‘vary’ only has grapheme a representing this sound. (ie. vary [v][a][r][y] /v/ /ɛə/ /r/ /i/). I believe this is the case with quite a few words in the list.

    Is this correct? Have you sorted these words together because it has something to do with epenthesis (linking r or intrusive r – I don’t know much about these)? Or should some of these words be on a separate list e.g. ‘a as in vary’ compared to ‘ar as in scarce’?

    Thank you in advance for your time and thoughts.

    Warmest regards,
    Michelle

    • alison says:

      Hi Michelle, you’re right, I need to edit this and a few other lists, it’s on my list of jobs to do before the end of the school holidays which start after next week. I need to rename this list a as in parent, and just add ‘ar as in scarce’ to the main list, I don’t think there are any other words with just ‘ar’ for the sound /air/. I wasn’t thinking hard enough about epenthesis when I made these lists, it seemed crazy to have a whole additional sound for the letter A. We have been struggling with this when coding words for our decodable text writing interface, as we count three phonemes in ‘scare’, ‘play’ and ‘grow’, but when you add a vowel suffix, the ‘r’, ‘y’ and ‘w’ become pronounced to separate the two vowels, so if you’re adding ‘ing’ that’s two phonemes, but the end product is ‘scaring’, ‘playing’ and ‘growing’ all with 6 phonemes. Gah. English. Sorry that was confusing and I will fix it soon. Alison

  2. Christopher says:

    Should military be on this list?

    • alison says:

      In my accent, the ‘a’ or ‘ar’ ( I think really I should rename this ‘a as in parent’ because the ‘r’ is pronounced) in ‘military’ is either a schwa/unstressed vowel (/ˈmɪlətəri/ or completely elided (/ˈmɪlətri/). So I don’t think so, except of course in one’s ‘spelling voice’, where each syllable is said the way it’s spelt.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *