Graphemes for the phoneme /w/

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Graphemes for /w/

Timothy is the younger brother of Tristan and takes a little longer to think up words for his analyses, so he uses the Word Searcher whenever he can to help him expand his vocabulary and complete the task facing him. While Tristan was documenting his findings with regard to the phoneme / s /, Timothy was identifying words that use the phoneme / w /. He knew that you could write / w / using the single letter grapheme < w > and the digraph <wh>, what he didn’t know was when to use which.

Timothy discovered several things in his investigation. The figure on the right summarizes his discoveries.

Once Timothy had discovered that question words use the digraph <wh>, he found it easy to write them all.

The Word Searcher provided a few extras including <whither> which Timothy had never heard of before.

We made a list of the question words and discovered something else about them as our table below shows.

Finally, both Timothy and Tristan analysed the rest of the words from the Word Searcher list and discovered that more than half of the remaining words imitated sounds or sounded like their meaning. These were the onomatopoeic words and we have put them together in a list.

So that left only a few more words and these have been included in our table above.

Oh and there was one other word: <narwhal> it didn’t fit with our model because it wasn’t an English word. We discovered that this was from the Danish word: narhval from an Old Norse word: nāhvalr : nār, corpse (from its whitish color) + hvalr, whale.

Not bad for a single session.

Note: We modeled this off the tables that Melvyn Ramsden produces to illustrate the graphemes that are used to represent a phoneme.

Onomatopoeic Words

The Interrogatives
(Question Words)