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Another example includes words like mean / ˈ m iː n / and meant / ˈ m ɛ n t /, where ea is pronounced differently in the two related words. Thus, again, the orthography uses only a single spelling that corresponds to the single morphemic form rather than to the surface phonological form.
The cot–caught merger is a phonemic merger that occurs in some varieties of English causing the vowel in words like cot, rock, and doll to be pronounced the same as the vowel in the words caught, talk, law, and small. The psalm–sum merger is a phenomenon occurring in Singaporean English where the phonemes /ɑ/ and /ʌ/ are both pronounced /ɑ/.
The English plural morpheme is written -s regardless of whether it is pronounced as /s/ or /z/, e.g. cats and dogs, not cats and dogz. This is because the [s] and [z] sounds are forms of the same underlying morphophoneme, automatically pronounced differently depending on its environment.
These are known as heterophonic names or heterophones (unlike heterographs, which are written differently but pronounced the same). Excluded are the numerous spellings which fail to make the pronunciation obvious without actually being at odds with convention: for example, the pronunciation / s k ə ˈ n ɛ k t ə d i / [ 1 ] [ 2 ] of ...
Some roots have more than one oblique stem, in which case they may have more than one adjectival form in English. Stressed vowel plus -an and unstressed -ian. The forms of these suffixes depends on the first vowel of the nominal suffix in Latin or Greek. The resulting forms are carried over into Latin from Greek, and into English from Latin.
Both of those examples are over 100 years old: “Hir” was used in the Sacramento Bee in 1920, and “ze” was used by a writer known only by the initials JWL in 1864.
Homographs are words with the same spelling but having more than one meaning. Homographs may be pronounced the same , or they may be pronounced differently (heteronyms, also known as heterophones). Some homographs are nouns or adjectives when the accent is on the first syllable, and verbs when it is on the second.
The grammar of Old English differs greatly from Modern English, predominantly being much more inflected.As a Germanic language, Old English has a morphological system similar to that of the Proto-Germanic reconstruction, retaining many of the inflections thought to have been common in Proto-Indo-European and also including constructions characteristic of the Germanic daughter languages such as ...