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This is the pronunciation key for IPA transcriptions of Italian on Wikipedia. It provides a set of symbols to represent the pronunciation of Italian in Wikipedia articles, and example words that illustrate the sounds that correspond to them.
In Italian phonemic distinction between long and short vowels is rare and limited to a few words and one morphological class, namely the pair composed by the first and third person of the historic past in verbs of the third conjugation—compare sentii (/senˈtiː/, "I felt/heard'), and sentì (/senˈti/, "he felt/heard").
Vowels pronounced with the tongue lowered are at the bottom, and vowels pronounced with the tongue raised are at the top. For example, [ɑ] (the first vowel in father) is at the bottom because the tongue is lowered in this position. [i] (the vowel in "meet") is at the top because the sound is said with the tongue raised to the roof of the mouth.
In Modern English, Latin loanwords with ae are generally pronounced with /iː/ (e.g. Caesar), prompting Noah Webster to shorten this to e in his 1806 spelling reform for American English. In German, ae is a variant of ä found in some proper names or in contexts where ä is unavailable.
The base alphabet consists of 21 letters: five vowels (A, E, I, O, U) and 16 consonants. The letters J, K, W, X and Y are not part of the proper alphabet, but appear in words of ancient Greek origin (e.g. Xilofono), loanwords (e.g. "weekend"), [2] foreign names (e.g. John), scientific terms (e.g. km) and in a handful of native words—such as the names Kalsa, Jesolo, Bettino Craxi, and Cybo ...
Nevertheless, the SVO sequence is sometimes replaced by one of the other arrangements (SOV, VSO, OVS, etc.), especially for reasons of emphasis and, in literature, for reasons of style and metre: Italian has relatively free word order. The subject is usually omitted when it is a pronoun—distinctive verb conjugations make it redundant. Subject ...
Romanesco pronunciation and spelling differs from Standard Italian in these cases: /j/ (lengthened) is used where standard Italian uses . This is spelt j , a letter seldom used in present-day Italian. Compare Italian figlio "son" and Romanesco fijo or fìo thanks to assimilation;
Ï, lowercase ï, is a symbol used in various languages written with the Latin alphabet; it can be read as the letter I with diaeresis, I-umlaut or I-trema.. Initially in French and also in Afrikaans, Catalan, Dutch, Galician, Southern Sami, Welsh, and occasionally English, ï is used when i follows another vowel and indicates hiatus in the pronunciation of such a word.