A number of English words have two different pronunciations: one with a weak vowel -generally, more common- and another with a strong vowel, which occurs in specific situations, such as being stressed, placed at the end of a clause or having a different grammatical function. The great majority of them are function words (prepositions, pronouns, auxiliary or modal verbs, etc.). The list of words with both weak and strong forms is quite long, so rather than reproducing it in full I’ll explain how they work and give some cases I consider particularly important. This new section is a work in progress, so I’ll be publishing the articles as I finish them. Here’s the first one: