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fowər where ** fewər would be expected by normal sound change. Assimilations involving adjacent numbers are especially common, e.g. *kʷetwṓr "four" >! *petwṓr by assimilation to *pénkʷe "five" (in addition, /kʷ/ > /p/ is a cross-linguistically common sound change in general). On the other extreme, the Early Modern English change of ...
The lot–cloth split is the result of a late 17th-century sound change that lengthened /ɒ/ to [ɒː] before voiceless fricatives (off, broth, cost), voiced velars (dog, long) and also before /n/ in the word gone.
The early history of Kentish was similar to Anglian, but sometime around the ninth century all of the front vowels æ, e, y (long and short) merged into e (long and short). The further discussion concerns the differences between Anglian and West Saxon, with the understanding that Kentish, other than where noted, can be derived from Anglian by ...
ea was pronounced like [æɑ], gliding from the sound of the vowel æ to a . [119] [120] (The spelling ea might have been used in place of æa because the latter would have essentially been a trigraph aea . [121] [122]) eo was pronounced like [eo], gliding from the sound of the vowel e to o . [119] [123]
The following table shows the 24 consonant phonemes found in most dialects of English, plus /x/, whose distribution is more limited. Fortis consonants are always voiceless, aspirated in syllable onset (except in clusters beginning with /s/ or /ʃ/), and sometimes also glottalized to an extent in syllable coda (most likely to occur with /t/, see T-glottalization), while lenis consonants are ...
Reduction of /ts/ to /s/ – a Middle English reduction that produced the modern sound of soft c . Medial cluster reduction – elision of certain stops in medial clusters, such as the /t/ in postman. Insertion (epenthesis) of stops after nasals in certain clusters, for example making prince sound like prints, and dreamt rhyme with attempt.
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.
For example, when representing a vowel, y represents the sound /ɪ/ in some words borrowed from Greek (reflecting an original upsilon), whereas the letter usually representing this sound in non-Greek words is the letter i . Thus, myth / ˈ m ɪ θ / is of Greek origin, while pith / ˈ p ɪ θ / is a Germanic word.