On English Pronunciation

[lawrencelpy]

/aɪ/ is pronounced like the letter i
In ride /raɪd/, we pronounce r"i"d (like the letter i)
But in write/right /raɪt/, we don't pronounce like w"i"t. The /ai/ sound seems lost, why

[OrphanPip]

I think that would depend on the region and English speaker. I would never pronounce the I in ride like rid. Anyway, the inconsistent phonetics in English are due to a few things. One is the fact that English shares origins with both Latin based languages (primarily French though some influences directly from Latin) and also from Northern European Germanic languages through Danish and primarily Anglo-Saxon (a language whose closest living widely spoken relative today is Dutch).

However, in most cases this can be explained by a phenomenon called the Great English Vowel shift. In English we used to have long vowels that had little lines over them to indicate the long pronunciation of the vowel. However over a long period between Middle English and Modern English (somewhat due to French influences) the pronunciation of the long vowels shifted until we had separate pronunciations between the short and long of a vowel that were distinctly different. Thus wife or white no longer had a long "i" which sounded like the double 'e' in three, but instead became the 'ai' sound we recognize today. You'd need to ask a linguist why this happened, which is beyond my knowledge.

[lawrencelpy]

I think that would depend on the region and English speaker. I would never pronounce the I in ride like rid. Anyway, the inconsistent phonetics in English are due to a few things. One is the fact that English shares origins with both Latin based languages (primarily French though some influences directly from Latin) and also from Northern European Germanic languages through Danish and primarily Anglo-Saxon (a language whose closest living widely spoken relative today is Dutch).

However, in most cases this can be explained by a phenomenon called the Great English Vowel shift. In English we used to have long vowels that had little lines over them to indicate the long pronunciation of the vowel. However over a long period between Middle English and Modern English (somewhat due to French influences) the pronunciation of the long vowels shifted until we had separate pronunciations between the short and long of a vowel that were distinctly different. Thus wife or white no longer had a long "i" which sounded like the double 'e' in three, but instead became the 'ai' sound we recognize today. You'd need to ask a linguist why this happened, which is beyond my knowledge.

Thankyou for you reply.
I think I need to ask a professor for further clarification.
And being a non-naive speaker, I just find the inconsistent phonetic symbols so confusing and unhelpful for my clear pronunciation.