why dosn't laughter rhyme with daughter???

[glenis]

why does laughter rhyme with after, but when you put a letter s in front of it (slaughter), it does rhyme with daughter

[Quizmonster]

For the same sort of reason that 'dough' doesn't rhyme with 'rough' or 'bough' or several other 'ough' words. 'Laughter' comes originally from old Gothic 'hlahjan' and 'daughter' comes from Greek 'thygater' via German 'Tochter'.
It's practically useless to try to explain the connection between English spelling and pronunciation...after all 'ghoti' is pronounced 'fish'. That is, when the 'gh' is pronounced as in 'rough', the 'o' is pronounced as in 'women' and the 'ti' is pronounced as in 'nation'!

[Peter Pedant]

They're called eye-rhymes: as in

The poet Euripides

is an old sobersides

His play Andromache

Doesnt make your ribs ache

 

as for why cow only sometimes rhymes with bow is because they have very different origins which affects the spelling more than other languages

[glenis]

thanks to you both ,all i can say is that thank goodness i am english -i would hate to learn english as a second language with all its idiosyncrasies

[SteveD]

Have a go at this!:

http://www.baetzler.de/humor/english_pronounciation.html

[smudge]

Thanks for that Steve, I've just saved that in my fav's!

[nigidivitch]

Cool!  Haven't seen that rhyme in ages - had to transcribe it phonetically in my first year linguistics exam many years ago!

Oh what fun that was!!

[colin salmon]

 Talking about the English language, spelling and pronounciation some years ago I came across a rhyming game where the words door and saw were paired as rhyming words  and according to the manufacturers of the game about 90% of the population of Britian pronounced these words so they rhymed. Sorry I am Scottish and with our pronounciation there is no way these words could rhyme.