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The English words sphere /ˈsfɪər/ and sphinx /ˈsfɪŋks/, Greek loanwords, break the rule that two fricatives may not appear adjacently word-initially. Some English words, including thrash, three, throat, and throw, start with the voiceless dental fricative /θ/, the liquid /r/, or the /r/ cluster (/θ/+/r/).
Words ending in vowels would elide with the following word if it started with a vowel or h; words ending with -m would also be elided in the same way (this is called ecthlipsis). [19] [20] In writing, unlike in Greek, this would not be shown, with the normal spelling of the word represented.
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.
The song "Counting Stars" by OneRepublic features the line "hope is our four-letter word". Hate: The band Shock Therapy sang a song "Hate Is a 4-Letter Word". Jazz: A photo-montage by partner-artists Privat & Primat is titled "Jazz and Love are 4-Letter Words". Nice: Good Omens's famous wall scene: Crowley's "I'm not nice; nice is a four-letter ...
Persian also does not allow clusters at the beginning of a word and typically uses /æ/ to break up such clusters in borrowings except between /s/ and /t/, when /o/ is added. [citation needed] Spanish does not allow clusters at the beginning of a word with an /s/ in them and adds e-to such words: Latin species > especie, English stress > estrés.
The most common example is x , which normally represents the consonant cluster /ks/ (for example, in tax / t æ k s /). The same letter (or sequence of letters) may be pronounced differently when occurring in different positions within a word. For instance, gh represents /f/ at the end of some words (tough / t ʌ f /) but not in others (plough ...
In these languages, words beginning in a vowel, like the English word at, are impossible. This is less strange than it may appear at first, as most such languages allow syllables to begin with a phonemic glottal stop (the sound in the middle of English uh-oh or, in some dialects, the double T in button, represented in the IPA as /ʔ/).
A language may represent a given phoneme by combinations of letters rather than just a single letter. Two-letter combinations are called digraphs, and three-letter groups are called trigraphs. German uses the tetragraphs (four letters) "tsch" for the phoneme German pronunciation: and (in a few borrowed words) "dsch" for [dʒ]. [87]