How to pronounce English pronunciation together

Some things become chaotic if there are too many regulations. English pronunciation rules are a typical example.

Let me tell you a story about Trough and Enough.

Have you ever watched the American soap opera "I love Lucy"? In the show, the hostess Lucy bullies her husband Ricky, including verbal "abuse". Ricky is an immigrant from South America and speaks English with a Spanish accent. When Lucy is patient, she will teach Ricky correct English pronunciation (which is rare), and when she is impatient, she will laugh at his sloppy accent (such ridicule is common). This is where the jokes come from.

In the United States, Spanish is the first foreign language, and everyone can speak a few sentences. I remember one time Lucy taught Ricky how to say the word through (pronounced [thru:]) in English. She told Ricky a pronunciation rule: the letter combination "ough" in English should be pronounced [u:]. After that, Lucy asked Ricky to teach her Spanish on a whim. Ricky obeyed, but Spanish required grunting, and Lucy couldn't learn it. She bared her teeth and hesitated, feeling clumsy and embarrassing, and immediately cursed Spanish, saying that she was not as easy to learn as English. In order to defend the integrity of the nation, Ricky, the doormat, fought back: "How good is your English? This is an ough combination. Today I was asked to read [thru:], but yesterday I was asked to read [i'n?0?2f](enough) , why can't I read [i'nu:]?".

English has pronunciation rules, but those rules are often unconvincing and "exceptions" emerge in endlessly. Just this combination of "ough", which is pronounced as "enough, tough, rough, cough" [?0?2f], but among "dough, through, thorough, bought, fought, nought, ought, soough", it is pronounced as anything. . In bought, fought, nought, ought, ough is pronounced [òt]; in dough and thorough, it is pronounced [ou]; in through, it is pronounced [u:]. To be honest, this kind of pronunciation rule deserves to be scolded.

Look at another pronunciation rule: the vowel combination ea and ee should be pronounced [i:]. There are many English words that use these two sets of vowel combinations. We can make pairs of them for comparison. For example: meet/meat, beet/beat, all follow the rules. But the pair sweet/sweat is contradictory, because in sweat, -ea is pronounced [e] instead of [i:]. This is not the only one that only does half of it, breed/break, deed/dead, greet/great, three/threat, leech/leather, zee/zeal, etc. These pairs of words are all about obedience and disobedience. Just like local governments treating central policies, half of them are implemented and half of them are disobeyed. (The English proverb "Never do things by halves" is also said to others). With so many outlaws, the rules can only be modified accordingly: the letter combination ea is sometimes pronounced as [i:], sometimes as [e], and sometimes as [ei]. As for which sound is pronounced under what circumstances, it is not determined. You can grasp it by feel. What's even more annoying is that the word ea in the word lead is pronounced [i:] when used as a verb and [e] when used as a noun. The same spelling should not have different pronunciation values. Is there any consistency in this "broken English"?

The combination ee reads [i:] is still consistent, but the problem is the combination ea. Here we list some pairs of phrases (mostly common words) to "dispel" the inconsistency in pronunciation of ea: bead/breast, cheat/create, deacon/deaf, deal/dealt, feast/feather, heal/ health, jean/jealous, leash/leather, meager/meadow, , read/ready, weak/weapon, etc. There are countless words with inconsistencies in pronunciation.

Furthermore, the word "here" is pronounced [hi?0?5]. Add t before this word to form the word "there", but the same ere is pronounced [ε?0?5] in the latter. Which one is regulated by the pronunciation rules and which one is an exception? Judging from the pronunciation of dear and fear, the letter combination ear should be pronounced [i?0?5]. But as soon as this was clarified, another pair of words bear and pear told you that the letter combination ear should be pronounced [ε?0?5].

Bird, heard, and word have the same vowel [?0?5]; bed, bury, dead, and said also share the same [e]. What is this pronunciation rule?

Are you a little confused? If not, here is another set of words: rose, lose, dove. The pronunciation is: [rouz], [lu:z], [d?0?2v], where can you go to reason? Life and give: Although they are a noun and a verb, they are both typical open syllables. Why are they pronounced in double syllables? Vowel [laif], the other is pronounced short [liv]? Do you still think you love English?