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The words given as examples for two different symbols may sound the same to you. For example, you may pronounce cot and caught , do and dew , or marry and merry the same. This often happens because of dialect variation (see our articles English phonology and International Phonetic Alphabet chart for English dialects ).
Most commonly, the change is a result of sound assimilation with an adjacent sound of opposite voicing, but it can also occur word-finally or in contact with a specific vowel. For example, the English suffix -s is pronounced [s] when it follows a voiceless phoneme ( cats ), and [z] when it follows a voiced phoneme ( dogs ). [ 1 ]
As the International Phonetic Alphabet does not have separate symbols for the alveolar consonants (the same symbol is used for all coronal places of articulation that are not palatalized), it can represent the sound as in a number of ways including ð̠ or ð͇ (retracted or alveolarized [ð], respectively), ɹ̝ (constricted [ɹ]), or d̞ ...
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.
Differences in pronunciation between American English (AmE) and British English (BrE) can be divided into . differences in accent (i.e. phoneme inventory and realisation).See differences between General American and Received Pronunciation for the standard accents in the United States and Britain; for information about other accents see regional accents of English.
Words like alms, balm, calm, Chalmers, qualm, palm and psalm now generally have /ɑː/ in the standard accents, while holm and Holmes are homophones of home(s). Some accents (including many of American English) have reintroduced the /l/ in these words as a spelling pronunciation. The word salmon generally retains a short vowel despite the loss ...
For example, when representing a vowel, y represents the sound /ɪ/ in some words borrowed from Greek (reflecting an original upsilon), whereas the letter usually representing this sound in non-Greek words is the letter i . Thus, myth / ˈ m ɪ θ / is of Greek origin, while pith / ˈ p ɪ θ / is a Germanic word.
Square brackets are used with phonetic notation, whether broad or narrow [17] – that is, for actual pronunciation, possibly including details of the pronunciation that may not be used for distinguishing words in the language being transcribed, but which the author nonetheless wishes to document. Such phonetic notation is the primary function ...