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The English modal auxiliary verbs are a subset of the English auxiliary verbs used mostly to express modality (properties such as possibility and obligation). [a] They can most easily be distinguished from other verbs by their defectiveness (they do not have participles or plain forms [b]) and by their lack of the ending ‑(e)s for the third-person singular.
All dialects of Old English had diphthongs, which were written with digraphs composed of two vowel letters, such as ea , eo , io . Like monophthongs, diphthongs could be short or long. Phonologically, the short versions behave like short monophthongs, and the long versions like long monophthongs. In modern texts, long diphthongs are marked with ...
Y-cluster reductions. Y-cluster reductions are reductions of clusters ending with the palatal approximant /j/, which is the sound of y in yes, and is sometimes referred to as "yod", from the Hebrew letter yod (h), which has the sound [j]. Many such clusters arose in dialects in which the falling diphthong /ɪu/ (the product of the merger of ...
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 ...
In languages like French, elision removes the end syllable of a word that ends with a vowel sound when the next begins with a vowel sound, in order to avoid hiatus, or retain a consonant-vowel-consonant-vowel rhythm. [2] Many of these poetic contractions originate from archaic English. By the end of the 18th century, contractions were generally ...
West Frisian has final obstruent devoicing and so voiced obstruents are merged with the voiceless obstruents at the end of words. Thus, word-final /b, d, v, z, ɣ/ are merged into voiceless /p, t, f, s, χ/, although final /b/ is rare. [17]
Phonotactics (from Ancient Greek phōnḗ 'voice, sound' and taktikós 'having to do with arranging') [1] is a branch of phonology that deals with restrictions in a language on the permissible combinations of phonemes. Phonotactics defines permissible syllable structure, consonant clusters and vowel sequences by means of phonotactic constraints.
Assimilation is a sound change in which some phonemes (typically consonants or vowels) change to become more similar to other nearby sounds. A common type of phonological process across languages, assimilation can occur either within a word or between words.