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The hull–hole merger is a conditioned merger of /ʌ/ and /oʊ/ before /l/ occurring for some speakers of English English with l-vocalization. As a result, "hull" and "hole" are homophones as [hɔʊ]. The merger is also mentioned by Labov, Ash, and Boberg (2006: 72) as a merger before /l/ in North American English that might require further study.
By West Germanic times, /d/ was pronounced as a stop [d] in all positions. The fricative allophones are sometimes indicated in reconstructed forms to make it easier to understand the development of Old English consonants. Old English retained the allophony [ɡ~ɣ], which in case of palatalisation (see below) became [dʒ~j].
The cot–caught merger is a phonemic merger that occurs in some varieties of English causing the vowel in words like cot, rock, and doll to be pronounced the same as the vowel in the words caught, talk, law, and small. The psalm–sum merger is a phenomenon occurring in Singaporean English where the phonemes /ɑ/ and /ʌ/ are both pronounced /ɑ/.
Diagram of the changes in English vowels during the Great Vowel Shift. The Great Vowel Shift was a series of pronunciation changes in the vowels of the English language that took place primarily between the 1400s and 1600s [1] (the transition period from Middle English to Early Modern English), beginning in southern England and today having influenced effectively all dialects of English.
These are known as heterophonic names or heterophones (unlike heterographs, which are written differently but pronounced the same). Excluded are the numerous spellings which fail to make the pronunciation obvious without actually being at odds with convention: for example, the pronunciation / s k ə ˈ n ɛ k t ə d i / [ 1 ] [ 2 ] of ...
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The same letter (or sequence of letters) may be pronounced differently when occurring in different positions within a word. For instance, gh represents /f/ at the end of some words (tough / t ʌ f /) but not in others (plough / p l aʊ /). At the beginning of syllables, gh is pronounced /ɡ/, as in ghost / ɡ oʊ s t /.
Both of those examples are over 100 years old: “Hir” was used in the Sacramento Bee in 1920, and “ze” was used by a writer known only by the initials JWL in 1864.