ABSTRACT
Single vowel letters may represent either a short or a long vowel phoneme, as in bit and bite, usually with some marker to show which is meant, like that final <-e>. Why are such vowel pairs, spelt with the same letter, so very different phonetically? In learning to read you have been told they were 'the same' apart from their length difference, so it is difficult to realise that, as sounds, they are phonetically quite different. Here we require a little history.
