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A word like immediately, for example, is variously pronounced by Americans as: ihMEEdeeuhtlee; uhMEEdeeuhtlee; eeMEEdeeuhtlee; The Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary suggests the first pronunciation. Similarly, this pronunciation markup guide will choose the most widely used form. NOTE: This guide is designed to be simple and easy to use.
Some speakers may pronounce consonant-final English words with a strong vocalic offset, [definition needed] especially in isolated words (e.g. "dog" can be [ˈdɔɡə]). Czech /r/ is alveolar trill. There is a tendency to pronounce the trill in English and in all positions where r is written.
The Knorkator song "[Buchstabe]" (the actual title is a glyph) on the 1999 album Hasenchartbreaker uses a similar sound (though linguolabial instead of bilabial) to replace "br" in a number of German words (e.g. [ˈʙaːtkaɐ̯tɔfəln] for Bratkartoffeln).
American soldiers could ferret out German infiltrators during their time in the Western Front. German spies were taught British English, which was different from American English. For example, Britons used the word lorry rather than the American term truck. American soldiers used such words as a shibboleth to distinguish Nazi spies.
If a common English rendering of the non-English name exists (Venice, Nikita Khrushchev), its pronunciation, if necessary, should be indicated before the non-English one. For English words and names, pronunciation should normally be omitted for common words or when obvious from the spelling; use it only for loanwords from other languages (coup ...
This is the pronunciation key for IPA transcriptions of Old English on Wikipedia. It provides a set of symbols to represent the pronunciation of Old English in Wikipedia articles, and example words that illustrate the sounds that correspond to them.
Some English words borrowed from French may begin with the letter h but not with the sound /h/. Examples include heir, and, in many regional pronunciations, hour, hono(u)r and honest. In some cases, spelling pronunciation has introduced the sound /h/ into such words, as in humble, human, hotel and (for most speakers) historic.
English does not have a labial click (or any click consonant, for that matter) as a phoneme, but a plain bilabial click does occur in mimesis, as a lip-smacking sound children use to imitate a fish. Labial clicks only occur in the Tuu and Kx'a families of southern Africa, and in the Australian ritual language Damin .