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Most of what I've written has been published as e-books and is available at Amazon. Match Play is a golf/suspense novel. Dust of Autumn is a bloody one set in upstate New York. Prairie View is set in South Dakota, with a final scene atop Rattlesnake Butte. Life in the Arbor is a children's book about Rollie Rabbit and his friends (on about a fourth grade level). The Black Widow involves an elaborate extortion scheme. Happy Valley is set in a retirement community. Doggy-Dog World is my memoir. And ES3 is a description of my method for examining English sentence structure.
In case anyone is interested in any of my past posts, an archive list can be found at the bottom of this page. I'd appreciate any feedback you may have by sending me an e-mail note--jertrav33@aol.com. Thanks for your interest.

Sunday, November 10

Insomnia

What does one do in the depth of night when one wakes up and stares in the darkness at the inside of one’s eyelids? Well, old English teachers lie there and obsess on the vagaries of English spelling and pronunciation. How, I ask myself, can any non-English speaking person learn to read, write, or pronounce English when we have so many spelling and pronunciation anomalies? I think of “though” and then add a “t” to make “thought.” Okay, two different vowel sounds for the “ou” (“oh” and “aw”) with the “gh” silent. Then I add an “r” to make “through” and I now have an “oo” sound. Now I find a diphthong in “bough” and “sough” (which can be pronounced as either “sow” or “suff” and is obviously related to “sigh”). I heave a deep sigh and go on to “cough” and “tough,” with vowel sounds like “aw” and “uh” and the “gh” so longer silent but sounding like a rough “eff.” And all this is only the tip of the iceberg of the English spelling conundrum. Don’t even get me started on the “esh” phoneme in English. I tried, successful finally, to get back to sleep. Although it was rough, I thought it through, fought for sleep, and then soughed like a bough in a midnight breeze.

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