Today’s phonetic symbol is i:
Let’s look at this on the phonemic chart (reproduced from the EnglishClub website: Interactive Phonemic Chart | EnglishClub )
Some examples of the sound i: are (‘sheep’, ‘seat’, ‘receive’, ‘achieve’ and convenient)
As you can see, there are several ways of spelling this sound, but only one phonetic symbol i:
Go the website and click on this symbol in order to hear how it sounds. As you can see, there is a word underneath each symbol, and this is an example of a word containing that sound. The example given for i: is ‘sheep’. I suggest you listen to this word as many times as you need, so that you can really fix the sound in your mind. You can also do this by typing ‘sheep’ into a website such as wordreference.com or Google Translate and clicking on the loudspeaker symbol.
I should also mention at this stage that when we write phonetic symbols, in order to differentiate between these and standard alphabet letters, we surround them with slash symbols. Hence ‘seat’ is written as / si:t / .
Can you think of any other words containing the sound / i: / ? Please write them in the comments box below!
Tomorrow, we’ll look at the phonetic symbol / ɪ / and compare it with / i: /.
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