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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.
The following table lists some words irregularly with the force sound, rather than north, with the cases that make them so and regular north words by comparison. Note that in non-standard accents many words can shift their pronunciation without changing diaphonemes due to lexical diffusion .
Some words with the sound were borrowed into London Middle English, where the unfamiliar /y/ was substituted with /u/: gild < gyldan, did < dyde, sin < synn, mind < mynd, dizzy < dysiġ, lift < lyft etc. show the normal (Anglian) development; much < myċel shows the West Saxon development; merry < myriġ shows the Kentish development;
In the Middle English period, there were no standard spellings, but w was sometimes used to represent either a vowel or a consonant sound in the same way that Modern English does with y , particularly during the 14th and 15th centuries.
At some point in the Middle English period the more specific meaning of 'deer' became common, with the original meaning becoming lost by the end of the period. Compare German Tier, Dutch dier, Swedish djur, Danish and Norwegian dyr, Icelandic dýr. dūfedoppa: 'pelican'. The word pelican was borrowed into Middle English, ultimately from Ancient ...
Pronounced / oʊ / when at the end of a word in American English (borough and thorough thus rhyme with burrow and furrow), but reduced to / ə / when followed by another syllable in many dialects (such as in thoroughly). / ʌ p /, / ə p / hiccough Variant spelling of the more common hiccup. / ə f / Greenough
Note that some words contain an ae which may not be written æ because the etymology is not from the Greek -αι-or Latin -ae-diphthongs. These include: In instances of aer (starting or within a word) when it makes the sound IPA [ɛə]/[eə] (air). Comes from the Latin āër, Greek ἀήρ. When ae makes the diphthong / eɪ / (lay) or / aɪ ...
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] These poetic contractions originate from archaic English. By the end of the 18th century, contractions were generally looked ...