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A coda-less syllable of the form V, CV, CCV, etc. (V = vowel, C = consonant) is called an open syllable or free syllable, while a syllable that has a coda (VC, CVC, CVCC, etc.) is called a closed syllable or checked syllable.
The lengthening still survives in Modern English and accounts, for example, for the vowel difference between "staff" and the alternative plural "staves" (Middle English staf vs. stāves, with open-syllable lengthening in the latter word). The effects of open-syllable lengthening and trisyllabic laxing often led to differences in the stem vowel ...
In the word button, both syllables are closed syllables (but. ton) because they contain single vowels followed by consonants. Therefore, the letter u represents the short sound / ʌ /. (The o in the second syllable makes the / ə / sound because it is an unstressed syllable.) Open syllables are syllables in which a vowel appears at the end 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 Geordie, the GOOSE vowel undergoes an allophonic split, with the monophthong [uː ~ ʉː] being used in morphologically-closed syllables (as in bruise [bɹuːz ~ bɹʉːz]) and the diphthong [ɵʊ] being used in morphologically-open syllables word-finally (as in brew [bɹɵʊ]) but also word-internally at the end of a morpheme (as in brews ...
Words that originally had long vowels, such as team and cream (which come from Old English tēam and Old French creme), may have /ɪə/, and those that had an original short vowel, which underwent open syllable lengthening in Middle English (see previous section), like eat and meat (from Old English etan and mete), have a sound resembling /ɛɪ ...
The schwa / ə / is usually considered neither free nor checked because it cannot stand in stressed syllables. In non-rhotic dialects, non-prevocalic instances of / ɜːr / as in purr, burr and / ər / as in lett er , bann er pattern as vowels, with the former often being the long counterpart of the latter and little to no difference in quality ...
Later, ME open syllable lengthening caused the short vowel /o/ to be normally changed to /ɔː/ in open syllables. Remaining instances of the short vowel /o/ also tended to become lower. Hence in Late Middle English (around 1400) the following open back vowels were present, distinguished by length: [1] /ɔ/, spelt o , as in dog, god