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In late Middle English, the extremely rare word-initial cluster fn-became sn-(EME fnesen > LME snezen > ModE sneeze). It has been suggested that the change could be due to a misinterpretation of the uncommon initial sequence fn-as ſn-(sn-written with a long s). [18]
Since the start of the name of a letter was expected to be the sound of the letter (the acrophonic principle), in Greek these letters came to be used for vowels. For example, the Greeks had no glottal stop or voiced pharyngeal sounds, so the Phoenician letters ’alep and `ayin became Greek alpha and o (later renamed omicron ), and stood for ...
The cheer–chair merger is the merger of the Early Modern English sequences [iːr] and [eːr], which is found in some accents of modern English. The fern–fir–fur merger is the merger of the Middle English vowels /ɪ, ɛ, ʊ/ into [ɜr] when historically followed by /r/ in the coda of the syllable.
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.
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 California Job Case was a compartmentalized box for printing in the 19th century, sizes corresponding to the commonality of letters. The frequency of letters in text has been studied for use in cryptanalysis, and frequency analysis in particular, dating back to the Arab mathematician al-Kindi (c. AD 801–873 ), who formally developed the method (the ciphers breakable by this technique go ...
In Early Middle English, partly by borrowings from French, they split into separate phonemes: /f, v, θ, ð, s, z/. See Middle English phonology – Voiced fricatives. Also in the Middle English period, the voiced affricate /dʒ/ took on phonemic status. (In Old English, it is considered to have been an allophone of /j/).
Modern English is written with a Latin-script alphabet consisting of 26 letters, with each having both uppercase and lowercase forms. The word alphabet is a compound of alpha and beta, the names of the first two letters in the Greek alphabet.