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Old English, or Anglo-Saxon, was an early form of English in medieval England. It is different from Early Modern English, the language of Shakespeare and the King James Bible, and from Middle English, the language of Geoffrey Chaucer. See Old English phonology for more detail on the sounds of Old English.
Old English did possess a voiced velar fricative sound [ɣ], which developed from Proto-Germanic *ɡ, but [ɣ] is usually analyzed as a separate phoneme from /x/: the sounds were normally distinguished in spelling, with [ɣ] written as g and /x/ as h , although some unetymological interchange of these spellings occurs, especially in word-final ...
List of languages Language Language family Phonemes Notes Ref Total Consonants Vowels, [clarification needed] tones and stress Arabic (Standard) Afroasiatic: 34: 28 6 Number of phonemes in Modern Standard Arabic, without counting the long vowels /eː/ and /oː/ which are phonemic in Mashriqi dialects or other dialectal phonemes.
Like other old Germanic languages, it is very different from Modern English and Modern Scots, and largely incomprehensible for Modern English or Modern Scots speakers without study. [3] Within Old English grammar nouns, adjectives, pronouns and verbs have many inflectional endings and forms, and word order is much freer. [ 2 ]
This was later extended in Pre-Old English times to vowels before all nasals; hence Old English niman "take" but Old High German neman. Loss of /n/ before /x/, with nasalization and compensatory lengthening of the preceding vowel. The nasalization was eventually lost, but remained through the Ingvaeonic period.
Forms in italics denote either Old English words as they appear in spelling or reconstructed forms of various sorts. Where phonemic ambiguity occurs in Old English spelling, extra diacritics are used (ċ, ġ, ā, ǣ, ē, ī, ō, ū, ȳ). Forms between /slashes/ or [brackets] indicate, respectively, broad or narrow pronunciation
For many English speakers, the first part of the ow sound in cow. ⓘ Mandarin 他 tā, American English father, Spanish casa, French patte ⓘ RP cut, German Kaiserslautern (In transcriptions of English, [ɐ] is usually written ʌ .) ⓘ RP father, French pâte, Dutch bad ⓘ French Caen, sans, temps: Nasalized [ɑ]. ⓘ
Some speakers of Caribbean English [13] and Mexican American English merge /v/ with /b/, making ban and van homophones (pronounced as [ban], or as [βan] with a bilabial fricative). The distinction of /v/ from /b/ is one of the last phonological distinctions commonly learnt by English-speaking children generally, and pairs like dribble/drivel ...