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The American spelling is nearer the Old French source licorece, which is ultimately from Greek glykyrrhiza. [159] The British spelling was influenced by the unrelated word liquor. [160] Licorice prevails in Canada and it is common in Australia, but it is rarely found in the UK.
The South American beverage, mate, is frequently spelled maté in English, adding an acute accent (as in 'café') to indicate that the word has two syllables and is not pronounced like the English word mate (/ ˈ m eɪ t /). In Spanish, such an accent would shift the stress and change the meaning of the word (maté meaning "I killed" in Spanish).
Differences in pronunciation between American English (AmE) and British English (BrE) can be divided into . differences in accent (i.e. phoneme inventory and realisation).See differences between General American and Received Pronunciation for the standard accents in the United States and Britain; for information about other accents see regional accents of English.
Several pronunciation patterns contrast American and British English accents. The following lists a few common ones. Most American accents are rhotic, preserving the historical /r/ phoneme in all contexts, while most British accents of England and Wales are non-rhotic, only preserving this sound before vowels but dropping it in all other contexts; thus, farmer rhymes with llama for Brits but ...
Spelling pronunciations are also possible, in which all words that historically contain schwas in their orthography are pronounced as /z/, even when the usual pronunciation would be /s/. English is less prone to perfect liaison-style sandhi than Portuguese, Spanish and French might be. Often, two identical or very similar consonants follow each ...
The following is a handy reference for editors, listing various common spelling differences between national varieties of English. Please note: If you are not familiar with a spelling, please do some research before changing it – it may be your misunderstanding rather than a mistake, especially in the case of American and British English spelling differences.
Southern American English as Americans popularly imagine began to take its current shape only after the beginning of the twentieth century. Some generalizations include: the conditional merger of [ɛ] and [ɪ] before nasal consonants, the pin–pen merger; the diphthong /aɪ/ becomes monophthongized to [a]; lax and tense vowels often merge ...
The regular spelling system of Old English was swept away by the Norman Conquest, and English itself was supplanted in some spheres by Norman French for three centuries, eventually emerging with its spelling much influenced by French. English had also borrowed large numbers of words from French, and kept their French spellings.