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Words that originally had long vowels, such as team and cream (which come from Old English tēam and Old French creme), may have /ɪə/, and those that had an original short vowel, which underwent open syllable lengthening in Middle English (see previous section), like eat and meat (from Old English etan and mete), have a sound resembling /ɛɪ ...
Note that some words contain an ae which may not be written æ because the etymology is not from the Greek -αι-or Latin -ae-diphthongs. These include: In instances of aer (starting or within a word) when it makes the sound IPA [ɛə]/[eə] (air). Comes from the Latin āër, Greek ἀήρ. When ae makes the diphthong / eɪ / (lay) or / aɪ ...
In an unstressed open syllable, /i/ and /u/ (including final /-u/ from earlier /-oː/) were lost when following a long syllable (i.e. one with a long vowel or diphthong, or followed by two consonants), but not when following a short syllable (i.e. one with a short vowel followed by a single consonant). [21] This took place in two types of contexts:
Modern editions conventionally mark long diphthongs with a macron on the first letter: e.g. long ēa , ēo in contrast to short ea , eo . [126] In this article, short diphthongs such as ea are transcribed like [æ͝ɑ] , and long diphthongs such as ēa are transcribed like [æ͞ɑ] .
The Dolgopolsky list is a word list compiled by Aharon Dolgopolsky in 1964 based on a study of 140 languages from across Eurasia. [1] It lists the 15 lexical items that he found have the most semantic stability, i.e. the 15 words least likely to be replaced.
So, if this is the sort of distinction you care about, we’ve got some more brain food for you: With 645 meanings, the most complicated word in English is only three letters long. Sources:
Academic Word List; Glossary of American terms not widely used in the United Kingdom; List of animal names; List of English abbreviations made by shortening words; List of homophonic abbreviations; English auxiliary verbs; List of English auxiliary verbs
In writing and typography, a ligature occurs where two or more graphemes or letters are joined to form a single glyph.Examples are the characters æ and œ used in English and French, in which the letters a and e are joined for the first ligature and the letters o and e are joined for the second ligature.