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In English orthography, many words feature a silent e (single, final, non-syllabic ‘e’), most commonly at the end of a word or morpheme. Typically it represents a vowel sound that was formerly pronounced, but became silent in late Middle English or Early Modern English .
3. In feminine nouns with a word-final mute -e denoting a female person, an extra ë is added in the plural to distinguish it from the plural of the corresponding masculine noun: Cliente [ˈkliɑ̃ːt] ("customer" [female], feminine, singular), Clienteën [ˈkliɑ̃ːtən] (plural with -n), Clienteë [ˈkliɑ̃ːtə] (plural without -n) vs.
Both Eastern and Western cultural traditions ascribe special significance to words uttered at or near death, [4] but the form and content of reported last words may depend on cultural context. There is a tradition in Hindu and Buddhist cultures of an expectation of a meaningful farewell statement; Zen monks by long custom are expected to ...
In Portuguese, ê marks a stressed /e/ only in words whose stressed syllable is in an otherwise unpredictable location in the word: "pêssego" (peach). The letter, pronounced /e/, can also contrast with é, pronounced /ɛ/, as in pé (foot). In Brazilian Portuguese, ê also used on final syllable of the root word e.g. Guinê-Bissau ("Guinea ...
Loss of final /e/, resulting in voiced fricatives at the end of a word where only voiceless fricatives had occurred. That is the source of the modern distinctions house vs. to house, teeth vs. to teethe, half vs. to halve.
Elision of word-final -f is almost always found in spoken Welsh to the point where the words are spelt with optional final -f in words like gorsa(f), pentre(f) and has been eradicated from the inflected prepositions: arna i, not * arnaf i - 'on me', etc. These always retain their final -f in the literary register, however.
Where a single consonant separates a vowel and a silent word final e, the first vowel is 'lengthened'. Unlike the doubling rule, the consonant is not doubled when 'lengthening' is undesired. Instead, the 'magic e' is dropped (unless it indicates soft or hard c or g , then the consonant is doubled).
In Welsh, word stress usually falls on the penultimate syllable, but one way of indicating stress on a final (short) vowel is through the use of the acute accent, often found on e in borrowed words: personél [pɛrsɔˈnɛl] "personnel", sigarét [sɪɡaˈrɛt] "cigarette", ymbarél [əmbaˈrɛl] "umbrella".