ABSTRACT
In English it is frequently the case that the spelling of a word does not directly reflect its pronunciation. A standard example would be that night and knight sound exactly the same, and that through and blue rhyme. The sounds of every dialect of English are different, sometimes just a little bit different, sometimes very different. An English word can start kn- if teachers are talking about the spelling system, but not if teachers are talking about the sound system. If a word ends with a stressed syllable and that syllable contains a short vowel sound and a final consonant sound written as a single consonant letter, that consonant letter is doubled before a suffix beginning with a vowel letter. Sometimes teachers will abbreviate consonant sound to CS and consonant letter to CL, and similarly vowel sound will be abbreviated to VS and vowel letter to VL.
