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Mulcaster also formulated the rule that a double letter, when final, indicated a short vowel in English, while the absence of doubling and the presence of silent e made the vowel long. In modern English, this rule is most prominent in its effects on the written "a" series: gal, gall, gale (/ɡæl, /ɡɔːl/, /ɡeɪl/).
"I before E, except after C" is a mnemonic rule of thumb for English spelling.If one is unsure whether a word is spelled with the digraph ei or ie , the rhyme suggests that the correct order is ie unless the preceding letter is c , in which case it may be ei .
In the Western Romance languages, a prothetic vowel was inserted at the beginning of any word that began with /s/ and another consonant, e.g. Latin spatha 'two-edged sword, typically used by cavalry' becomes the normal word for 'sword' in Romance languages with an inserted /e/: Spanish/Portuguese espada, Catalan espasa, Old French espede ...
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 ...
Many loanwords come from languages where the pronunciation of vowels corresponds to the way they were pronounced in Old English, which is similar to the Italian or Spanish pronunciation of the vowels, and is the value the vowel symbols a, e, i, o, u have in the International Phonetic Alphabet.
However, it is not always possible to predict whether a consonant is velar or palatal from the quality of the preceding vowel; some palatal consonants arose after the vowel i , which is unchanged by i-umlaut (as in rīċu; contrast strīcan) and for historical reasons, some words developed palatal consonants between two back vowels (as in ...
In the same contexts where the voiceless fricatives /f, θ, s/ become voiced, i.e. between vowels and between a voiced consonant and a vowel, /h/ is lost, [26] with compensatory lengthening of the preceding vowel if it is short. [27] This occurs after breaking; hence breaking before /rh/ and /lh/ takes place regardless of whether the /h/ is ...
A pulmonic consonant is a consonant made by obstructing the glottis (the space between the vocal folds) or oral cavity (the mouth) and either simultaneously or subsequently letting out air from the lungs. Pulmonic consonants make up the majority of consonants in the IPA, as well as in human language. All consonants in English fall into this ...