Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
More extensive L-vocalization is a notable feature of certain dialects of English, including Cockney, Estuary English, New York English, New Zealand English, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia English, in which an /l/ sound occurring at the end of a word or before a consonant is pronounced as some sort of close back vocoid, e.g., [w], [o] or [ʊ]. The ...
It altereth the sound of all the vowells, euen quite thorough one or mo consonants as, máde, stéme, éche, kínde, strípe, óre, cúre, tóste sound sharp with the qualifying E in their end: whereas, màd, stèm, èch, frind, strip, or, cut, tost, contract of tossed sound flat without the same E, And therefor the same loud and sharp sound in ...
For example, in such words as little and bottle, one might view le as an "endocentric" digraph for /əl/, or view e as an empty letter; similarly, with bu or u in buy and build. Not all silent letters are completely redundant: Silent letters can distinguish between homophones; e.g., in/inn; be/bee; lent/leant. This is an aid to readers already ...
Stress is a prominent feature of the English language, both at the level of the word (lexical stress) and at the level of the phrase or sentence (prosodic stress).Absence of stress on a syllable, or on a word in some cases, is frequently associated in English with vowel reduction – many such syllables are pronounced with a centralized vowel or with certain other vowels that are described as ...
Certain words, like piñata, jalapeño and quinceañera, are usually kept intact. In many instances the ñ is replaced with the plain letter n. In words of German origin (e.g. doppelgänger), the letters with umlauts ä, ö, ü may be written ae, oe, ue. [14] This could be seen in many newspapers during World War II, which printed Fuehrer for ...
In historical linguistics, a sound change is a change in the pronunciation of a language. A sound change can involve the replacement of one speech sound (or, more generally, one phonetic feature value) by a different one (called phonetic change) or a more general change to the speech sounds that exist (phonological change), such as the merger of two sounds or the creation of a new sound.
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 ...
This affects words such as lamb and plumb, as well as derived forms with suffixes, such as lambs, lambing, plumbed, plumber. By analogy with words like these, certain other words ending in /m/, which had no historical /b/ sound, had a silent letter b added to their spelling by way of hypercorrection. Such words include limb and crumb. [35]