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Some sources distinguish "diacritical marks" (marks upon standard letters in the A–Z 26-letter alphabet) from "special characters" (letters not marked but radically modified from the standard 26-letter alphabet) such as Old English and Icelandic eth (Ð, ð) and thorn (uppercase Þ, lowercase þ), and ligatures such as Latin and Anglo-Saxon Æ (minuscule: æ), and German eszett (ß; final ...
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 recently extinct Ubykh language had only 2 or 3 vowels but 84 consonants; [7] the Taa language has 87 consonants under one analysis, 164 under another, plus some 30 vowels and tone. [8] The types of consonants used in various languages are by no means universal.
In rhotic North American English there is no distinction between the vowels in nurse /ˈnɜːrs/ and letter /ˈlɛtər/. If you speak such a dialect, read /ɜːr/ as /ər/. The /ʌr/ of hurry often joins this neutralization; if you have it in your speech, read /ɜːr/, /ər/ and /ʌr/ as /ər/.
The letter Y used for words such as 𐤀𐤔 /ʔəʃ/ ys/υς "which" and 𐤀𐤕 /ʔət/ yth/υθ (definite accusative marker) in Greek and Latin alphabet inscriptions can be interpreted as denoting a reduced schwa vowel [20] that occurred in pre-stress syllables in verbs and two syllables before stress in nouns and adjectives, [31] while ...
The position of word stress in a word may depend on certain general rules applicable in the language or dialect in question, but in other languages, it must be learned for each word, as it is largely unpredictable, for example in English. In some cases, classes of words in a language differ in their stress properties; for example, loanwords ...
For instance, Received Pronunciation of English has been claimed to have anywhere between 11 and 27 vowels, whereas West ǃXoon has been analyzed as having anywhere from 87 to 164 consonants. Languages at the low end of the spectrum ( Piraha , Rotokas ) and especially the high end ( Ubykh , Gǀui , ǂʼAmkoe for consonants, Wobe etc. for tones ...
Common in a vast majority of modern English dialects worldwide is the merger of as many as five Early Modern English vowels (/ɛ/, /ɛː/, /ə/, /ɪ/, and /ʊ/) into /ɜ/ when followed by an /r/ before a consonant or at the end of a syllable. Thus, the vowels in words like fir, fur, and fern are the same in almost all modern accents of English.