Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
In English, this happens most often with vowels, although not exclusively. See phonemic differentiation for more information. Due to the wide geographic distribution of the English language and the number and variety of speakers, there are phonemic pairs which are distinguished in some accents and varieties, but considered identical in others.
Main page; Contents; Current events; Random article; About Wikipedia; Contact us; Pages for logged out editors learn more
The California Job Case was a compartmentalized box for printing in the 19th century, sizes corresponding to the commonality of letters. The frequency of letters in text has been studied for use in cryptanalysis, and frequency analysis in particular, dating back to the Arab mathematician al-Kindi (c. AD 801–873 ), who formally developed the method (the ciphers breakable by this technique go ...
In most English dialects, there are vowel shifts that affect only vowels before /r/ or vowels that were historically followed by /r/. Vowel shifts before historical /r/ fall into two categories: mergers and splits. Mergers are more common, so most English dialects have fewer vowel distinctions before historical /r/ than in other positions of a ...
The following is the chart of the International Phonetic Alphabet, a standardized system of phonetic symbols devised and maintained by the International Phonetic Association. It is not a complete list of all possible speech sounds in the world's languages, only those about which stand-alone articles exist in this encyclopedia.
For some English speakers in the UK, the vowels of goose and thought may be merged before dark syllable-final /l/ due to the phonetically raised pronunciation of the thought vowel in southern England (rather than [ɔː], the contemporary pronunciation of this vowel in Standard Southern British English is more accurately transcribed as [oː] or ...
Whereas the names of many letters sound alike, the set of replacement words can be selected to be as distinct from each other as possible, to minimise the likelihood of ambiguity or mistaking one letter for another. For example, if a burst of static cuts off the start of an English-language utterance of the letter J, it may be mistaken for A or K.
The bad–lad split is a phonological split of the Early Modern English short vowel phoneme /æ/ into a short /æ/ and a long /æː/. This split is found in some varieties of English in England and Australia. In Modern English, a new phoneme, /ɑː/, developed that did not exist in Middle English.