Theme 1K

Learning from the Spelling of < love >

Summary

Ability to spell and to understanding the reasons for spellings is a mode of thinking; orthography is cognitive and every engagement with it is a thinking activity. Real spellers know that uninformed mechanical ‘correctness’ has no equivalence with understanding; we learn from words whose spelling we already know because they are a rich and productive source of evidence for determining how the system really works.

This theme explains:

that there is much to learn from single words even when we are quite sure how to write them;
that complete English words do not have final < v >;
that < uv > is not an allowable letter sequence in English words — < ov > is used instead;
that only suffixes that have an initial vowel letter replace a final single non-syllabic < e >.