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The three short syllables in reliquiās do not fit into dactylic hexameter because of the dactyl's limit of two short syllables so the first syllable is lengthened by adding another l. However, the pronunciation was often not written with double ll , and may have been the normal way of pronouncing a word starting in rel- rather than a poetic ...
In Greek synaeresis, two vowels merge to form a long version of one of the two vowels (e.g. e + a → ā), a diphthong with a different main vowel (e.g. a + ei → āi), or a new vowel intermediate between the originals (e.g. a + o → ō). Contraction of e + o or o + e leads to ou, and e + e to ei, which are in this case spurious diphthongs.
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 .
/ks/ is reduced to /s/ before or after a consonant or at the end of words of more than one syllable. Cf. /ˈkalks, ˈsekstus/ > /ˈkals, ˈsestus/. [22] Intervocalically, it sometimes metathesizes to /sk/. Cf. /ˈwiːksit/ > /ˈβiːskit/. Words beginning with /sC/ receive an initial supporting vowel [ɪ], unless they are preceded by a word ...
An example is in this hendecasyllable (11-syllable line) by Garcilaso de la Vega: Los cabellos que al oro oscurecían. The hair that endarkened the gold. The words que and al form one syllable in counting them because of synalepha. The same thing happens with -ro and os-and so the line has eleven syllables (syllable boundaries are shown by a dot):
In words of two syllables, stress falls on the first syllable of the word (the penult, or second from the end): e.g., bó.nus, cír.cus. In words of three or more syllables, stress falls either on the penult or the antepenult (third from the end), according to these criteria:
Most commonly, the change is a result of sound assimilation with an adjacent sound of opposite voicing, but it can also occur word-finally or in contact with a specific vowel. For example, the English suffix -s is pronounced [s] when it follows a voiceless phoneme (cats), and [z] when it follows a voiced phoneme (dogs). [1]
In the case of /u/, the quality u was normally preserved in the endings -um, -ung, -uc or after an accented syllable containing the /u/ sound (as in duguþ); in other contexts (e.g. hēafod, heofon), u was variably interchanged with o depending on dialect and time period, with the use of o generally increasing over time, although there was a ...