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 .
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 ...
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 ...
However, these terms are also used to refer more narrowly to cases where two words are run together by the omission of a final sound. [1] An example is the elision of word-final /t/ in English if it is preceded and followed by a consonant: "first light" is often pronounced "firs' light" ( /fɜrs laɪt/ ). [ 2 ]
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 ...
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 ...
Get AOL Mail for FREE! Manage your email like never before with travel, photo & document views. Personalize your inbox with themes & tabs. You've Got Mail!
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.