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This list of words that may be spelled with a ligature in English encompasses words which have letters that may, in modern usage, either be rendered as two distinct letters or as a single, combined letter. This includes AE being rendered as Æ and OE being rendered as Œ.
English words of French origin should be distinguished from French words and expressions in English. Although French is mostly derived from Latin, important other word sources are Gaulish and some Germanic languages, especially Old Frankish. Since English is of Germanic origin, words that have entered English from French borrowings of Germanic ...
The variable outcome, along with other variable changes and the ambiguity of the Middle English spelling ou (either /ou̯/ or /uː/ in Early Middle English, accounts for the numerous pronunciations of Modern English words in -ough-(e.g. though, through, bough, rough, trough, thought, with -ough-pronounced /ou/, /uː/, /au/, /ʌf/, /ɒf/, /ɔː ...
In French, the words that were borrowed from Latin and contained the Latin diphthong written as œ now generally have é or è; but œ is still used in some non-learned French words, representing open-mid front rounded vowels, such as œil ("eye") and sœur ("sister").
Generally, words coming from French often retain a higher register than words of Old English origin, and they are considered by some to be more posh, elaborate, sophisticated, or pretentious. However, there are exceptions: weep , groom and stone (from Old English) occupy a slightly higher register than cry , brush and rock (from French).
Many words in the English vocabulary are of French origin, most coming from the Anglo-Norman spoken by the upper classes in England for several hundred years after the Norman Conquest, before the language settled into what became Modern English. English words of French origin, such as art, competition, force, money, and table are pronounced ...
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. Proto-Germanic * b became Old English /b/ only at the start of a word, after [m] , or when geminated.
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.