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The Old English phoneme /f/ descended in some cases from Proto-Germanic *f, which became [v] between voiced sounds as described above. But /f/ also had another source. In the middle or at the end of words, Old English /f/ was often derived from Proto-Germanic * [β] (also written *ƀ), a fricative allophone of the phoneme *b.
Forms in italics denote either Old English words as they appear in spelling or reconstructed forms of various sorts. Where phonemic ambiguity occurs in Old English spelling, extra diacritics are used (ċ, ġ, ā, ǣ, ē, ī, ō, ū, ȳ). Forms between /slashes/ or [brackets] indicate, respectively, broad or narrow pronunciation
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").
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 ...
Old English (Englisċ or Ænglisc, pronounced [ˈeŋɡliʃ]), or Anglo-Saxon, [1] was the earliest recorded form of the English language, spoken in England and southern and eastern Scotland in the Early Middle Ages.
Although the Old English diphthongs merged into monophthongs, Middle English began to develop a new set of diphthongs.Many of these came about through vocalization of the palatal approximant /j/ (usually from an earlier /ʝ/) or the labio-velar approximant /w/ (sometimes from an earlier voiced velar fricative [ɣ]), when they followed a vowel.
However, this earlier Middle English vowel /a/ is itself the merger of a number of different Anglian Old English sounds: the short vowels indicated in Old English spelling as a , æ and ea ; the long equivalents ā , ēa , and often ǣ when directly followed by two or more consonants (indicated by ā+CC, ǣ+CC, etc.);
The following table shows the 24 consonant phonemes found in most dialects of English, plus /x/, whose distribution is more limited. Fortis consonants are always voiceless, aspirated in syllable onset (except in clusters beginning with /s/ or /ʃ/), and sometimes also glottalized to an extent in syllable coda (most likely to occur with /t/, see T-glottalization), while lenis consonants are ...