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One of the noted difficulties of English spelling is a high number of silent letters. Edward Carney distinguishes different kinds of "silent" letters, which present differing degrees of difficulty to readers. Auxiliary letters which, with another letter, constitute digraphs; i.e., two letters combined which represent a single phoneme. These may ...
The spelling of Middle English is very irregular and inconsistent, with the same word being spelled in different ways, sometimes even in the same sentence. However, these were generally much better guides to the then-pronunciation than modern English spelling is. [opinion]
The English language is notorious for its use of silent letters. In fact, about 60 percent of English words contain a silent letter. In many cases, these silent letters actually were pronounced ...
In some English accents, the phoneme /l/, which is usually spelled as l or ll , is articulated as two distinct allophones: the clear [l] occurs before vowels and the consonant /j/, whereas the dark [ɫ] / [lˠ] occurs before consonants, except /j/, and at the end of words.
A spelling pronunciation is the pronunciation of a word according to its spelling when this differs from a longstanding standard or traditional pronunciation. Words that are spelled with letters that were never pronounced or that were not pronounced for many generations or even hundreds of years have increasingly been pronounced as written, especially since the arrival of mandatory schooling ...
The English values of the letters a, e, i, o, u used to be similar to the values those letters had in Spanish, French or Italian, namely , , , , . The Great Vowel Shift leading to Early Modern English gave current English "long vowels" values that differ markedly from the "short vowels" that they relate to in writing.
To illustrate: gh can only resemble f when following the letters ou or au at the end of certain morphemes ("tough", "cough", "laugh"), while ti would only resemble sh when followed by a vowel sound. The expected pronunciation in English would sound like "goatee" / ˈ ɡ oʊ t i / , not "fish".
In the English sentence nobody knows ∅ the zero pronoun plays the role of the object of the verb, and in ∅ makes no difference it plays the role of the subject. Likewise, the zero pronoun in the book ∅ I am reading plays the role of the relative pronoun that in the book that I am reading. In generative grammar, this is also referred to as ...