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Ough is a four-letter sequence, a tetragraph, used in English orthography and notorious for its unpredictable pronunciation. [1] It has at least eight pronunciations in North American English and nine in British English , and no discernible patterns exist for choosing among them.
Inflectional evidence suggests that occurred first when the following word began with a vowel. A century or so later, unstressed /ə/ also dropped in the plural genitive ending -es (spelled -s in Modern English) and the past ending -ed. The changes steadily effaced most inflectional endings: OE mētan → ME meete(n) → LME /meːt/ → NE meet ...
A single letter may even fill multiple pronunciation-marking roles simultaneously. For example, in the word ace, e marks not only the change of a from /æ/ to /eɪ/, but also of c from /k/ to /s/. In the word vague, e marks the long a sound, but u keeps the g hard rather than soft.
In German, for example, the tetragraph tsch represents the sound of the English digraph ch. English does not have tetragraphs in native words (the closest is perhaps the sequence -ough in words like through), but chth and phth are true tetragraphs when found initially in words of Greek origin such as chthonic and phthisis.
Reading by using phonics is often referred to as decoding words, sounding-out words or using print-to-sound relationships.Since phonics focuses on the sounds and letters within words (i.e. sublexical), [13] it is often contrasted with whole language (a word-level-up philosophy for teaching reading) and a compromise approach called balanced literacy (the attempt to combine whole language and ...
The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (abbreviated AHD) uses a phonetic notation based on the Latin alphabet to transcribe the pronunciation of spoken English. It and similar respelling systems, such as those used by the Merriam-Webster and Random House dictionaries, are familiar to US schoolchildren.
Some English words, including thrash, three, throat, and throw, start with the voiceless dental fricative /θ/, the liquid /r/, or the /r/ cluster (/θ/+/r/). This cluster example in Proto-Germanic has a counterpart in which /θ/ was followed by /l/. In early North and West Germanic, the /l/ cluster disappeared. This suggests that clusters are ...
Download as PDF; Printable version; ... Ough may refer to: Ough (orthography), a letter sequence in English orthography; Ough (surname) Ough, Nebraska, ...