Long and short vowels

Consonant doubling is part of the rather complex English system for spelling short and long vowels which is used with a, i, o, u and, to a lesser extent, e, as in:
flat, flatten – inflate;   hem, hemmed – theme;
hid, hidden – hide;  dot, dotty – dote;  tub, tubby – tube.

When the vowels  a,  e,  i,  o  and  u  are follow by just one consonant, they are closed and  are supposed to have a short sound, as in:  at,  pet,  pin,  dot,  bun.
If the consonant after the letters  a,  e,  i,  o  and  u  is followed by another vowel, they are supposed to be  ‘open’  and long, as in:  'hale, halo;   peter, period;     fine, final;   sole, solo; 
tube, tubular'.
If a stressed vowel before a consonant and another vowel is to stay long, it is supposed to be followed by a doubled consonant:  attitude,  petty,  pinnacle,  dotty,  bunny.

Several thousand English words conform to this system. Unfortunately, there are also hundreds of words which break the ‘open and shut’ rule in five different ways.
Two of them have already been discussed:
1. Nearly 400 words of more than one syllable break the doubling rule by failing to double a consonant after a short, stressed vowel (habit, very, city, body, study) .
2. Another 158 words have doubled consonants which are unrelated to keeping a stressed vowel short
 (accommodation, hello, immense, occur, hurrah).

In addition to the above,
3. Several hundred words with short vowels have a misleading, surplus –e:  have,  seven,  gone – cf. save, even, bone.

4. Nearly 200 words have other spellings for the short vowels
   e, i and u (bread, pretty, touch),
 often combined with missing doubled consonants as well (many, women; money).

5.The ‘open’ vowel spelling method is disobeyed
by 87 words for long a (made /paid,  make /break),
by 79 for long i (while /whilst,  mime /climb),
and  the ‘e-e’ spelling used in just 86 words
and different ones in 366 (eke – seek, speak, shriek).

This adds up to over 1000 common English words that disobey the ‘open and closed’ method for spelling long and short a, e, i, o and u. Since many pupils find even grasping the basic ‘bit, bitter, biting’ system quite difficult, the numerous exceptions leave them utterly confused.

Alternative spellings for the short vowels which are more often used for other sounds (busy bus, women wove, dreamt dreams) are clearly not helpful to young readers trying to crack the English alphabet code. The reading difficulties caused by missing double consonants are not as obvious, but they impede literacy progress too: hide, hidden – hideous??
As do incomprehensibly doubled consonants: arrow - arrive??

Any system that has more than 1000 exceptions is not really much of a ‘system’ at all. With the ‘open and closed’ method of spelling long and short vowels, the confusion that the irregularities cause is even worse. Abuses of one affect the other. Bringing more consistency to any of the five ways in which the ‘open and closed’ system is broken would help to strengthen this uniquely English way of spelling some vowels.

It took a quite while for English to be regarded as language fit for intellectual and scientific discourse. Now that this is firmly established, it is surely high time for its spelling rules to be made more applicable too?

I have already explained why the adoption of consistent consonant doubling would make learning to spell English substantially easier, and would help to turn many adults into more confident writers. I will next discuss and list the other groups of words which break the ‘open and closed’ vowel rule.