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Most final consonants are silent, except in most cases with the letters c , f , l , and r (the English word careful is a mnemonic for this set). But even this rule has its exceptions: final morphemic er is usually pronounced /e/ (= é ) rather than the expected /ɛʁ/.
In English orthography, many words feature a silent e (single, final, non-syllabic ‘e’), most commonly at the end of a word or morpheme. Typically it represents a vowel sound that was formerly pronounced, but became silent in late Middle English or Early Modern English .
The song The Gnu jokes about this silent g and other silent letters in English. In fact the g in gnu may always have been silent in English, since this loanword did not enter the language until the late 18th century. [26] The trumpeter Kenny Wheeler wrote a composition titled Gnu High, a pun on "new high".
The English language is notorious for its use of silent letters. In fact, about 60 percent of English words contain a silent letter. In many cases, these silent letters actually were pronounced ...
In Old English, k and g were not silent when preceding n . Cognates in other Germanic languages show that the k was probably a voiceless velar plosive in Proto-Germanic. For example, the initial k is not silent in words such as German Knecht which is a cognate of knight, Knoten which is a cognate of knot, etc.
Some consonant sounds also changed, specifically becoming silent; the term Great Vowel Shift is occasionally used to include these consonantal changes. [ 2 ] [ 3 ] The standardization of English spelling began in the 15th and 16th centuries; the Great Vowel Shift is the major reason English spellings now often deviate considerably from how they ...
All English consonants can be classified by a combination of these features, such as "voiceless alveolar stop" [t]. In this case, the airstream mechanism is omitted. Some pairs of consonants like p::b, t::d are sometimes called fortis and lenis, but this is a phonological rather than phonetic distinction.
This example illustrates how the aspirated h-word héros prevents the liaison, in which the otherwise-silent word-final consonant would be pronounced before the first vowel of the following word. Because the h is an aspirated h , the second entry is incorrect, as the hiatus prevents the final /z/ from being phonetically realised.