Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
In English orthography, many words feature a silent e (single, final, non-syllabic ‘e’), most commonly at the end of a word or morpheme. Typically it represents a vowel sound that was formerly pronounced, but became silent in late Middle English or Early Modern English .
Note that some words contain an ae which may not be written æ because the etymology is not from the Greek -αι-or Latin -ae-diphthongs. These include: In instances of aer (starting or within a word) when it makes the sound IPA [ɛə]/[eə] (air). Comes from the Latin āër, Greek ἀήρ. When ae makes the diphthong / eɪ / (lay) or / aɪ ...
QWERTY, one of the few native English words with Q not followed by U, is derived from the first six letters of a standard keyboard layout. In English, the letter Q is almost always followed immediately by the letter U, e.g. quiz, quarry, question, squirrel. However, there are some exceptions.
The following were scribal abbreviations during Middle and Early Modern English using the letter thorn: (þͤ) – a Middle English abbreviation for the word the (þͭ) – a Middle English abbreviation for the word that (þͧ) – a rare Middle English abbreviation for the word thou (which was written early on as þu or þou)
The change took place in educated London speech around the end of the 16th century, and explains why there is no [ɡ] sound at the end of words like fang, sing, wrong and tongue in the standard varieties of Modern English. [28] The change in fact applies not only at the end of a word, but generally at the end of a morpheme.
This vocalic w generally represented /uː/, [3] [4] as in wss ("use"). [5] However at that time the form w was still sometimes used to represent a digraph uu (see W), not as a separate letter. In modern Welsh, "W" is simply a single letter which often represents a vowel sound. Thus words borrowed from Welsh may use w this way, such as:
In Irish, h is not considered an independent letter, except for a very few non-native words; however, h placed after a consonant is known as a "séimhiú" and indicates the lenition of that consonant; h began to replace the original form of a séimhiú, a dot placed above the consonant, after the introduction of typewriters.
This h is almost regularly added at the end of inflectable word stems, e.g. Kuh (cow), Stroh (straw), drehen (to turn, stem dreh-). There is only a fairly small number of exceptions to this, mostly nouns in -ee or -ie (see below), apart from isolated cases such as säen (to sow).