Dragaera

basic questions about _Jhereg_

Mark A Mandel mam at theworld.com
Tue Feb 24 13:13:08 PST 2004

On Mon, 23 Feb 2004, Philip Hart wrote:

#OT, why are there two "r"s in "occurrence" and one in "appearance"?

Because the vowel before the /r/ sound in "occur" is a lax (~"short")
vowel and spelled with a single letter, while the vowel before the /r/
in "appear" is a tense (~"long") vowel and is written with a digraph.
Spoken English doesn't have double consonants except in compounds, like
"bird-dog", so between vowels written English uses double consonants to
show that the preceding vowel is lax:

	bidding   biding
	better    meter
	laddies   ladies
	hopping   hoping
	runner    runic

-- Dr. Whom, Consulting Linguist, Grammarian, Orthoepist, and
   Philological Busybody
   a.k.a. Mark A. Mandel