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The loss of postvocalic /r/ in the British prestige standard in the late 18th and the early 19th centuries influenced the American port cities with close connections to Britain, which caused upper-class pronunciation to become non-rhotic in many Eastern and Southern port cities such as New York City, Boston, Alexandria, Charleston, and Savannah. [9]
Some such pronunciations have spread from these dialects to become standard usage: the words vane, vat and vixen all had initial /f/ in Old English (fana, fæt, fyxen). [ 9 ] A similar phenomenon occurred in both German and Dutch .
In phonology, syncope (/ ˈ s ɪ ŋ k ə p i /; from Ancient Greek: συγκοπή, romanized: sunkopḗ, lit. 'cutting up') is the loss of one or more sounds from the interior of a word, especially the loss of an unstressed vowel.
The pronunciation with /n/ rather than /ŋ/ is a long-established one. Old English verbs had a present participle in -ende and a verbal noun ( gerund ) form in -ing(e) . These merged into a single form, written -ing , but not necessarily spoken as such – the /n/ pronunciation may be inherited from the former distinct present participle form.
In historical linguistics, a sound change is a change in the pronunciation of a language. A sound change can involve the replacement of one speech sound (or, more generally, one phonetic feature value) by a different one (called phonetic change) or a more general change to the speech sounds that exist (phonological change), such as the merger of two sounds or the creation of a new sound.
Trisyllabic laxing is a process which has occurred at various periods in the history of English: The earliest occurrence of trisyllabic laxing occurred in late Old English and caused stressed long vowels to become shortened before clusters of two consonants when two or more syllables followed.
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 ...
As a result, high-vowel loss must have occurred after i-mutation but before the loss of internal -(i)j-, which occurred shortly after i-mutation. Word-medial. Paradigm split also occurred medially as a result of high-vowel loss, e.g. in the past tense forms of Class I weak forms: PG * dōmidē > OE dēmde "(he) judged"