Thread: Help with English pronounciation

Originally Posted by yboivin

The pronounciation of the letter I. I remember someone saying that an I is pronounced diffently wether there a voyel after the I like Pine and pin. Or like visor and victim...

I searched the Internet throughly and can't come up with an answer. Can someone here help me with this ?

Thanks !

I too have not been able to find a good ruleset that describes exactly when I should be pronounced one way or another for any given word. But here is what I have experienced most frequently in my American English lifetime:

In American English, a general rule is that an I followed by a consonant and then an E will be pronounced as the I in Pine (fine, brine, sine, mine, tine, line, etc.) Otherwise, it is most commonly pronounced as I in Pin (bin, win, fin, tin, etc) although there are exceptions especially when an I is directly followed by two consonants.

But if an I is followed immediately by another vowel, it is nearly always pronounced as E in Meet (such as pier, trio, skiing, piece, etc) unless that vowel is an E and is the last letter of a one syllable word (such as in tie, pie, die, etc in which cases also their plurals or verb tense partner words like ties, pies, died, etc will share their same I pronunciations)

So many strange conventions! You may find that Received Pronunciation has some variances from these, and as even RP changes over time you may not always find a hard and fast rule that works for every English word you come across