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all bald ball call fall gall hall pall small smalt squall stall tall thrall wall |
almighty almost already also always appal Balkan basalt Bengal Calder Calwell enthral falsetto Galway install Montreal Myall palsy stalwart water walnut Walton
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5 responses to “a as in all”
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Hi,
Is there a spelling rule or reason as to why or when the letter a represents the ‘or’ sound?
I am guessing it has something to do with the following /l/ sound, but unsure.
Hi Natalie, the vowel-like sound “l” affects the pronunciation of quite a few vowels, probably in the olden days the vowels in these words were pronounced more like the “a” in “cat”, but over time they changed. You can find out a lot about the Great Vowel Shift which messed up our vowel spellings from the last couple of episodes of the History of English podcast.
Hi Alison,
Could you please help me understand how ‘all’ makes a /or/ sound? I understand that ‘al’ is making a /or/ in ‘walk’ but I would have assumed the same is true to the words above. For instance, in ‘ball’, I would have broken it up as b-al-l (/b/ /or/ /l/) and the same for tall, stall, call, etc. Then in ‘almost’ and ‘also’, there is only one ‘l’ not the 7ouble ‘ll’ – ‘all’.
Kind regards,
Rose
P.S. Your word lists are my bible when it comes to planning my phonics, spelling and reading lessons! Thank you so much for them!
Hi Rose, sorry to take so long to reply, I’ve been a bit snowed under. Thanks for the lovely feedback about my lists, glad they are useful. I think of the letter ‘a’ as representing the sound /or/ in words like all, tall, fall, ball, also, always etc, but it probably doesn’t matter whether you group ‘al’ as in walk, talk, chalk and talk with ‘al’ as in ball, tall, fall, wall. There still needs to be a second category for /or/ sound spelt just with letter ‘a’ for words like ‘also’, ‘almost’, ‘water’ and ‘bald’, since the letter /l/ in those (apart from water, no l, weird) is pronounced. It just depends which way you want to slice the words with double ‘l’, a+ll or al+l. As long as kids end up spelling the words correctly, I think whichever way you want to slice them is fine. All the best, Alison