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The Middle English initial cluster /ɡn/ is reduced to /n/ in Modern English. Like the reduction of /kn/, this seems to have taken place during the seventeenth century. [25] The change affected words like gnat, gnostic, gnome, etc., the spelling with gn-being retained despite the loss of the /ɡ/ sound.
In Middle English, vowel length was lost as a phonological feature, but was still phonetically present. A word like bide, syllabified bi.de and phonetically pronounced [biːdə], had one stressed, open, long syllable. On the other hand, the word bid, although stressed, had a short vowel: [bid].
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 ...
Vowel-initial words prepend the shm- directly to the beginning of the reduplicant (apple shmapple). Although this is conventionally seen by English speakers as purely adding consonants to a word, from a strictly phonetic point of view this, too, is a replacement of the initial glottal stop by the / ʃ m / morpheme.
Another example includes words like mean / ˈ m iː n / and meant / ˈ m ɛ n t /, where ea is pronounced differently in the two related words. Thus, again, the orthography uses only a single spelling that corresponds to the single morphemic form rather than to the surface phonological form.
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
A list of 100 words that occur most frequently in written English is given below, based on an analysis of the Oxford English Corpus (a collection of texts in the English language, comprising over 2 billion words). [1] A part of speech is provided for most of the words, but part-of-speech categories vary between analyses, and not all ...
Metathesis (/ m ə ˈ t æ θ ə s ɪ s / mə-TATH-ə-siss; from Greek μετάθεσις, from μετατίθημι "to put in a different order"; Latin: transpositio) is the transposition of sounds or syllables in a word or of words in a sentence.