why does "co" sometimes make a ka sound and sometimes a ko

When two vowels are separated by one or less consonants, the second one makes the first one a long vowel sound. When they're separated by two or more consonants, the vowel remains short. There are probably some weird exceptions I'm not thinking of, but this is generally true

I don't know the specific answer to this question, but in general English spelling is incredibly inconsistent. It's largely due to how much we've borrowed words from other languages. [A poem satirizing the situation](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tfRSvTSY0d4).

Because the Latin alphabet isn't actually that good for representing English.

That's a more regional American way of pronouncing it, in British accents all those words are pronounced with a 'ko'

One is a "short o" and one is a "long o". For example, cop vs. cope, cod vs. code, hop vs. hope, etc. In some accents, that short o becomes more of an "ah" sound, especially in parts of the US and Canada. Conduct as a noun / verb is a different thing though. With the first syllable stressed it's a short o, and with the second syllable stressed, the o gets reduced to a schwa.

Some North American accents pronounce the short o vowel sound as an 'ah' sound, resulting in things like the cot-caught merger.

English orthography is a nightmare. All vowels can make at least two sounds when stressed, and unstressed vowels are often elided or reduced to a "schwa" like sound, which further increases the number of possible sounds a given vowel can represent.

In some accents. These are all 'ko' in my northern English accent.

Because English is actually 10 languages wearing a trenchcoat.

Aside from count (which is cou-, not co-), I pronounce these pretty much the same way. cob/cog/cop/con have the same initial sound as corn; coca/cola/cocaine elongate the vowel a bit but do not change the sound. And conduct (noun) and conduct (verb) only differ in where you put the stress; the vowel sounds are the same to me

Okay so first English is not intuitive. It's like 5 languages mashed together. The spelling doesn't always tell you the sound but sometimes it is to show you connections to other words. And vowels are tricky because we have only 5 or 6 vowel letters but around 12 monothong vowel sounds. [https://pronuncian.com/sounds](https://pronuncian.com/sounds) this website actually does a good job of explaining the different sounds, their different spellings, and giving audio examples. For the first set it's because while the spelling is the same they represent different vowel sounds this can be because of language of origin or dialects. And for the CONduct and conDUCT it has to do with syllable stress and the SCHWA sound.

Count shouldn't count as an example. The combination of ou is not a type of o. Pronounce Flounder Cow Howitzer Now Brown Noun These are all examples of the /aʊ/ diphthong

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stress_and_vowel_reduction_in_English To oversimplify, unstressed vowels tend to get reduced/smushed in English, resulting in various vowels making the same sounds when unstressed (often the schwa, which is the most common sound in the language). Much of it is extremely inconsistent though.

Vowel letters in English all make multiple sounds, because English has more than 5 vowel sounds. Your examples have nothing to do with the "c"

Short amswer: 20 vowel sounds, 5 vowel letters. The vowel symbols have to do a lot of different jobs.

All vowels have 2 sounds attributed to them, O’s short sound can sometimes verge on an uh sound in certain accents

because English isn't necessarily pronounce as spelled. you can have five different ways to pronounce the same vowel letter (mad, many, mall, mark, malicious).

Coco, coca, and cola(kola) are borrowed words from other languages

I think the sounds you are describing are not a feature of the cot-caught merger, but rather the father-bother merger, which is present in a different set of accents.

Schwa! I learnt about this recently - until then I’d just let it happen naturally as a native speaker. Four of those last ones are ko except probably in American pronunciation.

I'd say only count makes the "ka" Sound, all the other examples you listed sound like Co to me

Maybe it is because of accents? I would only hear a slight ka sound in count but not in the other examples.

I think this is something youll notice particularly with US accents I would pronounce them all the same (ko) except the second co in coconut funnily enough which would be closer to ka

There is a concept of “open” and “closed” syllables. An open syllable is one that ends in a vowel, and a closed syllable ends in one or more consonants. The vowel in an open syllable (if not unstressed) tends to be long: co-co-nut, co-ca co-la, etc. The vowel in a closed syllable tends to be short: cob, cog, etc. When a closed syllable ends in two or more consonants, the “length” of the consonant cluster works to make the vowel long, as in colt. But this isn’t true for all consonant clusters, namely those containing r, m, n, etc. Diphthongs are inherently long, so the kind of syllable they are in are irrelevant, as seen in count. All of the preceding tends to make more sense if you understand the sound changes that true long vowels underwent centuries ago. (Long vowels literally only differ from short in the amount of time it takes to pronounce them; almost every English long vowel turned into some sort of diphthong during the Great Vowel Shift, leading to the distinctions we observe today).

*shrugs* *gestures vaguely at a box labeled 'English'*

short O and long 0 The C is insignificant CONduct (noun) - uses short O /ɒ/ • conDUCT (verb) - uses long O /oʊ/ the “cot-caught merger” - that’s exactly right! This is a dialect feature where some English speakers (particularly in western North America) pronounce these two vowel sounds the same way, while others (like in eastern North America and Britain) keep them distinct. If you have this merger, you might not hear as much difference between these vowel sounds as speakers from other regions do. The vowel distinction exists in the spelling patterns and word origins, but your local dialect determines whether you actually pronounce them differently.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

English uses the Latin alphabet, but has far more vowel qualities than Latin had. Moreover, English spelling follows the “morphophonemic principal”, which means that in most cases the spelling of a morpheme (a unit of meaning) is stable between words and contexts, regardless of how it is pronounced.

All those are ka.

Not in my accent - these all sound like ko to me.

the cot-caught merger doesn't have anything to do with it. I don't have it and pronounce all the words thee mentions as thee indicated. As RsonW said, the Latin alphabet isn't actually that good for representing English, which is true, but it COULD be a hell of a lot better; however, that take a MAJOR revamp of the spelling system and there's just too much already in print in the current spelling to switch over. Blame the Great Vowel Shift and the almost concurrent invention of the printing press. :)

Most modern languages can point to a single origin that forms the core of the language (Spanish and Italian come from Latin, Japanese writing uses actual Chinese characters and modified Chinese charactera, etc). English however has multiple significant influences from different languages that don't follow the same rules so it's not very consistent. I mean, at one point England had a class divide where the aristocracy used words with more of a French origin while the peasantry used words of Germanic origin and eventually it all just kind of combined together

Because it's no "co-n-duct" it's "con-duct"

I feel like only "count" from your example is pronounced with a "ka" sound.... But yeah, the same set of syllables can have different sounds, it is what it is :v

Because English

The only honest answer is that English has no consistent rules in pronunciation vs spelling.