945: Multiple Pronunciations of -s and -ed Jul 11, 2017

Standard English spelling is strange and at times confusing. For every rule such as "I before E except after C unless it says A (/ei/)" there are exceptions, including in this case, 'foreign'. Nevertheless, there are some ways in which English spelling is more simple than English speech. The suffixes '-(e)s' and '-(e)d' are used to represent the majority of plurals for nouns or past tense form of verbs respectively, however it is not pronounced the same always. Indeed, for both, there are three ways in which the same affix will be pronounced for different words. With pluralizing suffix, in 'churches', 'birds', and 'cats', though they all use the same letter, the pronunciation of that ending becomes /ɪz/, /z/, and /s/ respectively. Likewise, with the past tense ending '-ed', in 'biked', 'braved', and 'beloved', it appears as /t/, /d/, and /ɪd/ in speech. Therefore, even though the pronunciation varies somewhat, the spelling is more simple. There is not necessarily consistency concerning the pronunciation of all words, but the examples used before should be true for people speaking with the Standard American English accent, and most others.