So today I thought about how many letters are pronounced like one of the vowels, so I made a list.
In the first column is the vowel, a, e, i, o and u, and following them are the letters that are sounded out by that vowel.
E gets the overwhelming majority. A and O get nothing but themselves.
a a j k e b c d e g p t v z i i y o o u q u w
But what about the missing letters:
f h l m n r s x
What makes them so special?
And the sounds that don’t even have letters, like th.
There’s probably lots of language people and phoneme people who’ve worked all this out but I just noticed it today.