Our son Anthony is in First grade and has spelling tests on Fridays from his weekly list. I’m mostly a musician but love to help him with his spelling by telling him the history of the letter K for example. Our question is this: Why do we not pronounce all the written syllables in the […]
Dear Language Nerd,Why do we say stretched, fetched, and retched, but wretchèd? -Delphine Sultzer *** Dear Delphine, Because the first three are verbs and the last one’s an adjective. English has a lot of rules (shocking, I know) about pronunciation. We lucky native speakers use them all the time without ever realizing, and the regular-past-tense-ending […]