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The basic rule is that words including at least one back vowel get back vowel suffixes (karba – in(to) the arm), while words excluding back vowels get front vowel suffixes (kézbe – in(to) the hand). Single-vowel words which have only the neutral vowels (i, í or é) are unpredictable, but e takes a front-vowel suffix.
Trisyllabic laxing is a process which has occurred at various periods in the history of English: The earliest occurrence of trisyllabic laxing occurred in late Old English and caused stressed long vowels to become shortened before clusters of two consonants when two or more syllables followed.
Another example can be seen in a language that has vowel harmony (like Turkish): [15]: 9 the vowels within a given word share the same quality, so a word boundary is likely to occur whenever the vowel quality changes. Nevertheless, not all languages have such convenient phonetic rules, and even those that do present the occasional exceptions.
A silent e is usually dropped when a suffix beginning with a vowel is added to a word, for example: cope to coping, trade to tradable, tense to tension, captive to captivate, plague to plaguing, secure to security, create to creator, etc. However, this is inconsistently applied, as in the case of liveable. In the case of the "-ment" suffix ...
For example, "matches" [kəbrit] is sometimes pronounced as [kərbit], [mogzit] "nanny" is sometimes pronounced as [mozgit]. The word "Monday" is [säɲo], which is the base for "Tuesday" [maksäɲo], which is often metathesized as [maskäɲo]. All of these examples show a pair of consonants reversed so that the stop begins the next syllable.
The vowel alternation may involve more than just a change in vowel quality. In Athabaskan languages, such as Navajo, verbs have series of stems where the vowel alternates (sometimes with an added suffix) indicating a different tense-aspect. Navajo vowel ablaut, depending on the verb, may be a change in vowel, vowel length, nasality, and/or tone.
The word vowel comes from the Latin word vocalis, meaning "vocal" (i.e. relating to the voice). [2] In English, the word vowel is commonly used to refer both to vowel sounds and to the written symbols that represent them ( a , e , i , o , u , and sometimes w and y ). [3]
Most commonly, the change is a result of sound assimilation with an adjacent sound of opposite voicing, but it can also occur word-finally or in contact with a specific vowel. For example, the English suffix -s is pronounced [s] when it follows a voiceless phoneme (cats), and [z] when it follows a voiced phoneme (dogs). [1]