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The three short syllables in reliquiās do not fit into dactylic hexameter because of the dactyl's limit of two short syllables so the first syllable is lengthened by adding another l. However, the pronunciation was often not written with double ll , and may have been the normal way of pronouncing a word starting in rel- rather than a poetic ...
To determine stress, syllable weight of the penult must be determined. To determine syllable weight, words must be broken up into syllables. [59] In the following examples, syllable structure is represented using these symbols: C (a consonant), K (a stop), R (a liquid), and V (a short vowel), VV (a long vowel or diphthong).
Monosyllabic nouns ending in a consonant receive an epenthetic final /e/, as in /ˈrem/ > /ˈren/ > /ˈrene/ > French rien. [30] Phonemic vowel length gradually collapses via the following changes (which only affect vowel length, not quality): [31] Long vowels shorten in unstressed syllables. Long vowels shorten in stressed closed syllables.
Trisyllabic laxing is a process which has occurred at various periods in the history of English: The earliest occurrence of trisyllabic laxing occurred in late Old English and caused stressed long vowels to become shortened before clusters of two consonants when two or more syllables followed.
W. S. Allen observed that in two-syllable words ending in -ō such as ĕcho and vēto, the final vowel is more often reduced when the first syllable is short. [ 374 ] In Latin, according to Lindsay, the word accent usually comes either on the syllable before, or on the syllable after the shortened syllable, but not on the shortened syllable itself.
In words of two or more syllables, it was possible for the stressed syllable to end in a short vowel (called a light syllable), although two-syllable words more often had a heavy first syllable (one that ended in a consonant or long vowel). [175]
Stress is often reinforced by allophonic vowel length, especially when it is lexical. For example, French long vowels are always in stressed syllables. Finnish, a language with two phonemic lengths, indicates the stress by adding allophonic length, which gives four distinctive lengths and five physical lengths: short and long stressed vowels, short and long unstressed vowels, and a half-long ...
Common in a vast majority of modern English dialects worldwide is the merger of as many as five Early Modern English vowels (/ɛ/, /ɛː/, /ə/, /ɪ/, and /ʊ/) into /ɜ/ when followed by an /r/ before a consonant or at the end of a syllable. Thus, the vowels in words like fir, fur, and fern are the same in almost all modern accents of English.