Apophony

Apophony, also known as ablaut, is a big word that describes a little thing that happens to words when we change them to show different things. When we use words, we want to show different things like past tense, or a plural version of the word. Sometimes changing the end of the word isn't enough, so we change the vowel sound in the middle of the word instead. This is called apophony. For example, when we say "sing" in the present tense, we have a short "i" sound in the middle, but when we say "sung" in the past tense, we have a long "u" sound in the middle. Another example is the word "man" which becomes "men" in the plural, and we change the a sound to an e sound to show that there is more than one. Apophony is just a fancy word for a little trick that we use all the time to make words mean different things!