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The H-cluster reductions are various consonant reductions that have occurred in the history of English, involving consonant clusters beginning with /h/ that have lost the /h/ (or become reduced to /h/) in some or all dialects.
For details, see T-glottalization, as well as English phonology (obstruents) and glottalization in consonant clusters. If all final voiceless stops are glottalized, as may occur in some London speech, then sets of words such as lick , lit and lip may become homophones, pronounced [lɪʔ] .
Moving forward in time, the two Middle English vowels /a/ and /aː/ correspond directly to the two vowels /a/ and /ɛː/, respectively, in the Early Modern English of c. 1600 AD (the time of Shakespeare). However, each vowel has split into a number of different pronunciations in Modern English, depending on the phonological context.
If syncope results in /tl/, the cluster is generally replaced by /kl/. Cf. /ˈwetulus/ > /ˈβɛklʊs/. [39] In cases where a long vowel precedes a geminate consonant, one of the elements often shortens unpredictably, sometimes leading to such doublets as /ˈkuppa~ˈkuːpa/ > /ˈkʊppa~ˈkupa/ > Spanish copa, cuba; French coupe, cuve. [40]
Cluster reduction also takes place in Catalan, and in a similar way as it happens in English. Certain consonant clusters placed at the end of a word are reduced: cent /sen/ instead of /sent/, although they recover the reduced consonant when the cluster falls between vowels: centenar /səntəˈna/.
Old English scribes occasionally omitted the letter h in words starting with these clusters. [94] A merge of the cluster /xw/ with /w/ is also attested in some historical and many current varieties of English, but has still not been completed, as some present-day speakers distinguish the former as [ʍ].
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 linguistics, a consonant cluster, consonant sequence or consonant compound, is a group of consonants which have no intervening vowel. In English, for example, the groups /spl/ and /ts/ are consonant clusters in the word splits. In the education field it is variously called a consonant cluster or a consonant blend. [1] [2]