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The Middle English merger of the vowels with the spellings our and ower affects all modern varieties of English and causes words like sour and hour, which originally had one syllable, to have two syllables and so to rhyme with power. In accents that lack the merger, sour has one syllable, and power has two syllables.
In an amphibrachic pair, each word is an amphibrach and has the second syllable stressed and the first and third syllables unstressed. attainder, remainder; autumnal, columnal; concoction, decoction (In GA, these rhyme with auction; there is also the YouTube slang word obnoxion, meaning something that is obnoxious.) distinguish, extinguish
Portmanteau: a new word that fuses two words or morphemes; Retronym: creating a new word to denote an old object or concept whose original name has come to be used for something else; Oxymoron: a combination of two contradictory terms; Zeugma and Syllepsis: the use of a single phrase in two ways simultaneously
In accent 2 words, this results in two high tones within the word (e.g. máttá), hence the term "two-peaked" for this dialect. In southern Swedish, a "one-peaked" dialect, accent 1 is realized as a high tone at the beginning of the stressed syllable (físken) and accent 2, by a low tone (màtta). [74]
For instance, in English, the word ah is spoken as a monophthong (/ ɑː /), while the word ow is spoken as a diphthong in most varieties (/ aʊ /). Where two adjacent vowel sounds occur in different syllables (e.g. in the English word re-elect) the result is described as hiatus, not as a diphthong.
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 ...
In the tables, the hyphen has two different meanings. A hyphen after the letter indicates that it must be at the beginning of a syllable, e.g., j - in jumper and ajar. A hyphen before the letter indicates that it cannot be at the beginning of a word, e.g., - ck in sick and ticket.
In words of two syllables, stress falls on the first syllable of the word (the penult, or second from the end): e.g., bó.nus, cír.cus. In words of three or more syllables, stress falls either on the penult or the antepenult (third from the end), according to these criteria: