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Silent e , like many conventions of written language that no longer reflect current pronunciations, was not always silent. In Chaucer's Balade, the first line does not scan properly unless what appears to current eyes to be a silent e is pronounced: Hyd, Absolon, thy giltè tresses clerè. Gilte ends in the same sound as modern English Malta.
This period includes changes in late Proto-Germanic, up to about the 1st century. Only a general overview of the more important changes is given here; for a full list, see the Proto-Germanic article. Unstressed word-final /a/, /e/ and /o/ were lost. Early PGmc *barta > late PGmc *bart "you carried (sg)". Word-final /m/ became /n/.
The initial consonant in the word finger in traditional dialects of England. Initial fricative voicing is a process that occurs in some traditional accents of the English West Country , where the fricatives /f/ , /θ/ , /s/ and /ʃ/ are voiced to [v] , [ð] , [z] and [ʒ] when they occur at the beginning of a word.
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 ...
The first elements of ēa, ēo, īo are generally accepted to have had the qualities [æ], [e], [i] (evidence for these qualities comes from the behaviour of breaking and back mutation as described below; the Middle English development of short ea into /a/ could also provide some evidence for the phonetic realisation of ēa). However, the ...
The second is [e], connecting stems that have historically been consonant stems to their case endings: nim+n → nimen. In Standard Finnish, consonant clusters may not be broken by epenthetic vowels; foreign words undergo consonant deletion rather than addition of vowels: ranta (' shore ') from Proto-Germanic *strandō. However, modern loans ...
A pulmonic consonant is a consonant made by obstructing the glottis (the space between the vocal folds) or oral cavity (the mouth) and either simultaneously or subsequently letting out air from the lungs. Pulmonic consonants make up the majority of consonants in the IPA, as well as in human language. All consonants in English fall into this ...
Back mutation changed i, e and sometimes a to io, eo and ea before a back vowel in the next syllable: PG *sebun > AF *sefon > OE seofon 'seven' PG *niþanē > OE neoþan 'from beneath' Palatal diphthongization changed æ, ǣ, e, ē to the diphthongs ea, ēa, ie, īe respectively after the palatalized consonants ġ, sċ, and ċ: