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Cardinal vowel chart showing peripheral (white) and central (blue) vowel space, based on the chart in Collins & Mees (2003:227). Phonetic reduction most often involves a mid-centralization of the vowel, that is, a reduction in the amount of movement of the tongue in pronouncing the vowel, as with the characteristic change of many unstressed vowels at the ends of English words to something ...
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 term "protracted phonological development" is sometimes preferred when describing children's speech, to emphasize the continuing development while acknowledging the delay. A study in the United States estimated that amongst 6 year olds, 5.3% of African American children and 3.8% of White children have a speech sound disorder.
In Old English, two forms of harmonic vowel breaking occurred: breaking and retraction and back mutation.. In prehistoric Old English, breaking and retraction changed stressed short and long front vowels i, e, æ to short and long diphthongs spelled io, eo, ea when followed by h or by r, l + another consonant (short vowels only), and sometimes w (only for certain short vowels): [3]
The Great Vowel Shift was a series of chain shifts that affected historical long vowels but left short vowels largely alone. It is one of the primary causes of the idiosyncrasies in English spelling. The shortening of ante-penultimate syllables in Middle English created many long–short pairs. The result can be seen in such words as,
The term vowel harmony is used in two different senses. In the first sense, it refers to any type of long distance assimilatory process of vowels, either progressive or regressive. When used in this sense, the term vowel harmony is synonymous with the term metaphony.
In some modern English accents, significant pre-L breaking occurs when /l/ follows certain vowels (/iː/, /uː/, and diphthongs ending [ɪ] or [ʊ]). Here the vowel develops a centering offglide (an additional schwa) before the /l/. This may cause reel to be pronounced like real, and tile, boil and fowl to rhyme with dial, royal and vowel.
Initial voicing is a process of historical sound change in which voiceless consonants become voiced at the beginning of a word. For example, modern German sagen [ˈzaːɡn̩] , Yiddish זאָגן [ˈzɔɡn̩] , and Dutch zeggen [ˈzɛɣə] (all "say") all begin with [z] , which derives from [s] in an earlier stage of Germanic, as is still ...