Having nothing to do the other day, I got to thinking, a dangerous concept I know but that's what happens when I'm left alone often enough: Take any long vowel sound and add an "L" or "R" to it. It doesn't work without creating an extra syllable! It only does this with long vowels and only with "Ls" and "Rs". Short vowels work just fine! There don't appear to be any exceptions! This is a real epiphany(my daughter's favorite word)for me! It means that long and short vowel sounds aren't just someone's idea and everyone decided to go along with them for the sake of argument. It is in fact, the law of physics!

Yea, this winter sure is dragging on...

I once spent a day constructing a system of figuring out the exact placement of any card in a deck of cards if perfectly cut and perfectly shuffled. With these parameters, found out that the deck will return to it's original sequence of cards in 23 shuffles. Cool, eh?

BTW, the word "sale" is according to the dictionary just one syllable. Exception?

When Okie pronounces it?

Sure, when it's French; Sa Le!!

Aw cmon', even Okie knows it has two syllable's:

"Garage Sale".

Hey, that's a pretty cool realization!

Love thinking about the spoken word, sounds of it and some of the wirednesses (yeah, it's not a word) surrounding it.

I'm drawing a blank here; could somebody provide some examples? Thanks.

Long vowels: a, e, i, o, u as in "A", "Eee", "Eye", "Oh" and "You". There is Y, "Why" also.

Each of those core vowel sounds are atomic in the english language. They do not have components --or syllabals like Semoochie is talking about.

Now, add on the l and or r letters and pronounce what you see, bearing in mind the vowel is long.

eg: A = "A" ; A + r = "Ayar" The "ya" sound is transitional and is mechanical in that we can't get from A to R without some movement that takes time and during that time it's vocalized.

A + l = "ayle" or maybe "A yu l" Again, there is a mechanical motion and time that gets vocalized no matter what.

If one is silent, the two break up, and that's distinct too, plus that's really hard!

Maybe that helps!

Sale, a womans idea, that by buying something, you are actually saving money.

Wife buys new outfit, and brags, "Honey, I saved $200.00 today, this new outfit was only 340.00 instead of 540.00".

Just tell her it makes her look "FAT". It'll be back on the rack in the store in no time. And when you get out of the hospital you will realize the outfit was less expensive than the medical bills.

> If one is silent, the two break up, and that's
> distinct too, plus that's really hard!
>
> Maybe that helps!

Oh! You have to sound them out, *and* the consonants have to come after the long vowel. That makes more sense. Before, I was thinking of words like "ale," which can't be hyphenated when it is written but it does have a distinct pause. The other examples that I was previously thinking of were ones where the consonants come before the long vowel, such as "fly." Consonants seem to be able to come before the long vowels without a pause (such as in "play").

"Bulletin, bulletin!" After careful thought, it occurred to me that there are two notable exceptions or rather, additions to my scheme: The "oy" sound as in "boy" or the "ow" sound as in "bough" or "bow". Faced with this new information, I'm thinking(There I go again!)that it might have to do with those "silent" vowels, "y" and "w". Is there an english teacher in the house? "Stay tuned for more total information!" PS: I tried to tell my wife about "silent vowels" and she thought the word began with a "B".

(still cracking up at DT's post...100% correct)

Wow Semoochie, you're losing me man. I feel like I'm living in Canada again.