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The English plural morpheme is written -s regardless of whether it is pronounced as /s/ or /z/, e.g. cats and dogs, not cats and dogz. This is because the [s] and [z] sounds are forms of the same underlying morphophoneme, automatically pronounced differently depending on its environment.
Another example includes words like mean / ˈ m iː n / and meant / ˈ m ɛ n t /, where ea is pronounced differently in the two related words. Thus, again, the orthography uses only a single spelling that corresponds to the single morphemic form rather than to the surface phonological form.
The cot–caught merger is a phonemic merger that occurs in some varieties of English causing the vowel in words like cot, rock, and doll to be pronounced the same as the vowel in the words caught, talk, law, and small. The psalm–sum merger is a phenomenon occurring in Singaporean English where the phonemes /ɑ/ and /ʌ/ are both pronounced /ɑ/.
The defining particular pronunciations of particular words that have more than an 86% likelihood of occurring in a particular cluster are: pajamas with either the phoneme /æ/ or the phoneme /ɑ/; coupon with either /ju/ or /u/; Monday with either /eɪ/ or /i/; Florida with either /ɔ/ or other possibilities (such as /ɑ/); caramel with either ...
Some letters are neither: for example, the letter denoting the glottal stop, ʔ , originally had the form of a question mark with the dot removed. A few letters, such as that of the voiced pharyngeal fricative, ʕ , were inspired by other writing systems (in this case, the Arabic letter ﻉ , ʿayn, via the reversed apostrophe). [9]
Several pronunciation patterns contrast American and British English accents. The following lists a few common ones. Most American accents are rhotic, preserving the historical /r/ phoneme in all contexts, while most British accents of England and Wales are non-rhotic, only preserving this sound before vowels but dropping it in all other contexts; thus, farmer rhymes with llama for Brits but ...
As mentioned above, Modern English derives mostly from the Anglian dialect rather than the standard West Saxon dialect of Old English. However, since London sits on the Thames near the boundary of the Anglian, West Saxon, and Kentish dialects, some West Saxon and Kentish forms have entered Modern English. For example, "bury" has its spelling ...
In initial position this appears to have been pronounced [z], and between vowels it appears to have been doubled to [zz] (counted as two consonants in poetry). [10] [11] /s/ was unvoiced in all positions in Classical Latin. Previously however Old Latin /s/ appears to have voiced to [z] between vowels, ultimately turning to /r/.