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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.
However, early Middle English /owx/ that was produced by Middle English breaking became late Middle English /uːh/: OE tōh (tough') /toːx/ → EME /towx/ → LME /tuːx/. Apparently, early /ow/ became /ɔw/ before the occurrence of Middle English breaking, which generated new occurrences of /ow/ , which later became /uː/ .
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.
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.
The word onomatopoeia with the œ ligature. Œ (minuscule: œ) is a Latin alphabet grapheme, a ligature of o and e.In medieval and early modern Latin, it was used in borrowings from Greek that originally contained the diphthong οι, and in a few non-Greek words.
Generally, the Middle English vowels descended from the corresponding Old English ones, but there were certain alternative developments. The Middle English open syllable lengthening caused short /o/ to be mostly lengthened to /ɔː/ (an opener back vowel) in open syllables, a development that can be seen in words like nose.
List of American words not widely used in the United Kingdom; List of British words not widely used in the United States; List of South African English regionalisms; List of words having different meanings in American and British English: A–L; List of words having different meanings in American and British English: M–Z
It is also argued [22] that Norse immigrants to England had a great impact on the loss of inflectional endings in Middle English. One argument is that, although Norse and English speakers were somewhat comprehensible to each other due to similar morphology, the Norse speakers' inability to reproduce the ending sounds of English words influenced ...