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Most native English speakers today find Old English unintelligible, even though about half of the most commonly used words in Modern English have Old English roots. [12] The grammar of Old English was much more inflected than modern English, combined with freer word order, and was grammatically quite similar in some respects to modern German.
Thus, Old Spanish bever "to drink", bivir/vivir "to live" become beber, vivir, respectively, following the Latin spelling bibere, vīvere. The Spanish placename Córdoba, often spelled Cordova in Old Spanish (the spelling that prevailed in English until the 20th century), now reflects the spelling used by the city's Roman founders, Corduba.
In the plural, Portuguese familiar vós is archaic nearly everywhere (as with the old English second singular "thou"), and both the subject pronoun and its corresponding second-person plural verb forms are generally limited to the Bible, traditional prayers, and spoken varieties of certain regions of rural Portugal; normally, the familiar (and ...
The only notable exceptions to this velarization are in some Spanish-influenced American English varieties (such as East Coast Latino English, which typically shows a clear "L" in syllable onsets) and in older, moribund Southern speech, where "L" is clear in an intervocalic environment between front vowels.
The English language descends from Old English, the West Germanic language of the Anglo-Saxons. Most of its grammar, its core vocabulary and the most common words are Germanic. [1] However, the percentage of loans in everyday conversation varies by dialect and idiolect, even if English vocabulary at large has a greater Romance influence.
Spanish is the second most spoken language in the United States.Over 43.4 million people aged five or older speak Spanish at home (13.7%). [1] Spanish is also the most learned language other than English, [3] with about 8 million students.
The Spanish "Golden Age" politically ends no later than 1659, with the Treaty of the Pyrenees, ratified between France and Habsburg Spain. During the long regency for Charles II , the last of the Spanish Habsburgs, favouritism milked Spain's treasury, and Spain's government operated principally as a dispenser of patronage.
Several pronunciation patterns contrast American and British English accents. The following lists a few common ones. Most American accents are rhotic, preserving the historical /r/ phoneme in all contexts, while most British accents of England and Wales are non-rhotic, only preserving this sound before vowels but dropping it in all other contexts; thus, farmer rhymes with llama for Brits but ...