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English orthography typically represents vowel sounds with the five conventional vowel letters a, e, i, o, u , as well as y , which may also be a consonant depending on context. However, outside of abbreviations, there are a handful of words in English that do not have vowels, either because the vowel sounds are not written with vowel letters ...
In the Western Romance languages, a prothetic vowel was inserted at the beginning of any word that began with /s/ and another consonant, e.g. Latin spatha 'two-edged sword, typically used by cavalry' becomes the normal word for 'sword' in Romance languages with an inserted /e/: Spanish/Portuguese espada, Catalan espasa, Old French espede ...
In linguistics, synaeresis (/ s ɪ ˈ n ɛr ə s ɪ s /; also spelled syneresis) is a phonological process of sound change in which two adjacent vowels within a word are combined into a single syllable. [1] The opposite process, in which two adjacent vowels are pronounced separately, is known as "diaeresis".
In linguistics, prothesis (/ ˈ p r ɒ θ ɪ s ɪ s /; from post-classical Latin [1] based on Ancient Greek: πρόθεσις próthesis 'placing before'), [2] [3] or less commonly [4] prosthesis (from Ancient Greek πρόσθεσις prósthesis 'addition') [5] [6] is the addition of a sound or syllable at the beginning of a word without changing the word's meaning or the rest of its structure.
Lexical diffusion is the hypothesis that a sound change is an abrupt change that spreads gradually across the words in a language to which it is applicable. [1] It contrasts with the Neogrammarian view that a sound change results from phonetically-conditioned articulatory drift acting uniformly on all applicable words, which implies that sound changes are regular, with exceptions attributed to ...
Elision of vowels often occurs across word boundaries when a word ending with a vowel is followed by a word beginning with a vowel, especially when the two vowels are the same, or when one is /i/. More specifically, elision occurs in the following circumstances: When both vowels are the same, one will be elided.
e.g. kosmiſch, brüskieren, Realismus, lesbiſch, Mesner; Oswald, Dresden, Schleswig, Osnabrück Many exceptions apply. Long ſ is used whenever round s is not used (for s): at the beginning of a syllable, i.e. anywhere before the vowel in the center of a syllable:
An additional vowel merger, the father–bother merger, which spread through North America in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, has resulted today in a three-way merger in which most Canadian and many U.S. accents have no vowel difference in words like PALM /ɑ/, LOT /ɒ/, and THOUGHT /ɔ/.