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However, this earlier Middle English vowel /a/ is itself the merger of a number of different Anglian Old English sounds: the short vowels indicated in Old English spelling as a , æ and ea ; the long equivalents ā , ēa , and often ǣ when directly followed by two or more consonants (indicated by ā+CC, ǣ+CC, etc.);
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.
The Great Vowel Shift was a series of chain shifts that affected historical long vowels but left short vowels largely alone. It is one of the primary causes of the idiosyncrasies in English spelling. The shortening of ante-penultimate syllables in Middle English created many long–short pairs. The result can be seen in such words as,
Vowels other than /a/ are often syncopated in unstressed word-internal syllables, especially in contact with liquid consonants or, to a lesser extent, nasal consonants or /s/, as in /ˈanɡulus, ˈkalida, ˈspekulum/ > /ˈanɡlʊs, ˈkalda, ˈspɛklu/.
The difference between [f θ s] and [v ð z] was generally not marked in Old English spelling. The sounds [f v] were both written as f , the sounds [s z] were both written as s , and the sounds [θ ð] were both written as either ð or þ (the two letters were not used in Old English to distinguish between the voiceless and voiced versions of ...
Many Greek letters are similar to Phoenician, except the letter direction is reversed or changed, which can be the result of historical changes from right-to-left writing to boustrophedon, then to left-to-right writing. Global distribution of the Cyrillic alphabet. The dark green areas shows the countries where this alphabet is the sole main ...
Certain English accents feature variant pronunciations of these sounds. These include fronting , where they merge with /f/ and /v/ (found in Cockney and some other dialects); stopping , where they approach /t/ and /d/ (as in some Irish speech); alveolarisation , where they become /s/ and /z/ (in some African varieties); and debuccalisation ...
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 ...