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How do you pronounce sieve?


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I tend to mispronounce words sometimes. My vocabulary comes is from reading so while I may know plenty of words, I'm a little shaky on how to say them. I always pronounced sieve like it looks: seev. But now we're memorizing a poem and I looked up the pronunciation just to be sure and it's apparently pronounced with a short vowel sound: siv. That sounds weird to me but I must say that I never say the word in my daily life. We would say colander or flour sifter, depending on how big the item in question is.

 

So is "seev" used by anyone or did I just make that up? :)

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'siv' here too.

 

don't worry about it though - i know exactly how you feel.

 

i was 20 when i said 'bifocals' in front of my best friend and he cracked up laughing at me - i'd never actually heard anyone SAY it and i pronounced it bif-a-culls.

 

...and i'm not telling how old i was when i found out that 'arkansas' is not ar-kansas. :tongue_smilie:

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'siv' here too.

 

don't worry about it though - i know exactly how you feel.

 

i was 20 when i said 'bifocals' in front of my best friend and he cracked up laughing at me - i'd never actually heard anyone SAY it and i pronounced it bif-a-culls.

 

...and i'm not telling how old i was when i found out that 'arkansas' is not ar-kansas. :tongue_smilie:

I said bravado as brav-a-doo.

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Siv, short vowel. I pronounced 'misled' as 'MY-zuhld' (stressed first syllable with a long 'i', followed by a schwa in the second syllable) when I was a child.

 

Laura

Me too! Though I was thirty before someone was "kind" enough to point it out to me (it's still a source of amusement for DH). I knew there was a word miss-led, I guess I just never wrote it. I feel a bit better knowing I'm not the only one. :)

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It is siv but why is it siv?

 

A child might look at sieve and think the double vowel "ie" was a digraph that would make the "I" long. Or look at the final e and think it must have a function as part of a split-digraph in making a long vowel sound.

 

So what does a "phonics expert" (which I am not one) tell a precocious child who wants to know?

 

Bill

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It is siv but why is it siv?

 

A child might look at sieve and think the double vowel "ie" was a digraph that would make the "I" long. Or look at the final e and think it must have a function as part of a split-digraph in making a long vowel sound.

 

So what does a "phonics expert" (which I am not one) tell a precocious child who wants to know?

 

Bill

 

The short i sound is one of the three sounds of ie. The final e is there because English words don't end in v.

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