Saturday, June 13, 2009

One Of The Boys

After a harrowing 10 months of having to watch his older brothers get to wrestle with Dad, Bradley has finally crossed over and reached his rite of passage. Unfortunately I only caught the end of it on camera. Welcome to the fight club Brad, (ha!) and watch out for Kaleb... he's vicious.



Kaleb has also given Bradley a new nickname. I'm not quite sure how to spell it phonetically, but the teacher in me is screaming for the correct phonemes to be represented.

(Bryce, maybe you can help me out with this one.)

It's not pronounced as an over-the-shoulder-boulder-holder, but the name is Bra-Bra. As in Bradley. How do I make that last A in his name say it's short sound?

I know the English language has rules... [along with way too many exceptions] such as... when a word is CVC, the vowel is short. "cat, picnic, moss..." Or if the word ends in a vowel that is not silent, it will make the long sound. "domino, me,"

Sooooo, if it is not CVC, and it has a vowel at the end, and I don't want it to say the long sound, how do I spell this correctly? Brah? No... Bragh? Probably not...

Thank you. I will expect an answer on my desk by morning.

8 comments:

  1. First, I love the look of terror on Blabby's face.
    Second, that phonics lesson went entirely over my head. I'm impressed.

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  2. I know, I wish I could have grabbed the camera faster. Then you would have seen him laughing... while gripping for dear life.

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  3. Bryce and I spent our date night arguing about phonemes. But the conclusion we came to was that you'd spell it "Braa".
    BTW, does it hurt Charles' knees to crawl around like that? My knees still hurt when I do stuff like that, and I wonder if it will always be that way, or if it will slowly get better. Anyway, thanks for the vid. Too cute!
    --Julianne

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  4. LOVED THAT :) So funny clinging onto his back :) And I have NO IDEA about the english- I guess I'm not a very good el ed teacher, huh?

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  5. You may just skip the "English" and go to a phoenetic transcription. For a cool website you can waste your time on, see below:

    http://accent.gmu.edu/browse_atlas.php

    You can click on little flags and hear people speak English in varying accents. There is a phoenetic transcription of the same paragraph . . .

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  6. Wow...people are way too smart...this whole thing is way over my head. I am excited to see the final conclusion.

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  7. Jules and Bryce~ I'm sorry I ruined your date night with arguments about phonemes! But I appreciate your help! I see how you would come up with Braa. It's kind of like when you write what a sheep says... "Baa". Minus the quivering in the voice! Also Bryce, thank you for the website. I followed your advice and "wasted" about an hour searching and following related links... but I couldn't find an answer. But I did find a pretty cool symbol for the sound phoneme I am searching for. It's like an ae stuck together. Anyway... thanks!

    Amber~ One thing I know, is that the d and t in Brad and brat DO make a difference. If a word has a CVC (consonant vowel consonant) pattern, then the vowel is supposed to be short. If it has a CVCe pattern (ending with an e) then it supposed to be long.
    But I see why you would come up with Bra and say that Bra should be brah. That make sense to me. Like if you shorten a word, that part of the word SHOULD just sound the same, right? So then I tried to think of other words that have been shortened and see how they sound. I thought of
    **"Brother... Bro..." but bro has the long sound and so the original phoneme (uh) is no longer there, otherwise it should say "bruh"
    **"Influenza... flu" also the long sound... but the original phoneme (oo) remains the same...
    "President... prez" Same sound, but now a different spelling. Assuming Prez is even a word... which it's underlined in red right now, so maybe it's not.
    What the heck?!

    Everyone~ I have come to the conclusion that there are too many exceptions in the English language. It is not consistent enough for me figure it out from examples alone. If I could find a word that rhymes with it then maybe I could just go with that. But the sheep's sound seems to be the closest. And it doesn't make me think of underwear. And so for all intensive purposes, whenever I refer to Bradley as his new nickname, I will be going with Braa-Braa.

    Thank you Jules, Bryce and Amber for your input on this bamboozling issue. On a more unambiguous note... we just got a sweet deal on some pretty awesome carpet. Raise the roof.

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  8. Hizidy heck Yeah! Woop Woop!

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