Quote:
Originally Posted by erimir
*The traditional view would include beet, bit, bet, bat, bot, but, bought, put, boot, balm and perhaps you could include Burt (even in its r-colored variants), which would bring it to 11 pure vowels to be distinguished with only 5 letters. But then you also have the diphthongs of bait, boat, bite, bout and boy as well.
For whatever reason, b-t gives a minimal pair for almost every monophthong and diphthong in English.
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balm
Bart
And at a stretch, the South African English borrowing from Afrikaans
boet rhymes with put.