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Letter frequency is the number of times letters of the alphabet appear on average in written language. Letter frequency analysis dates back to the Arab mathematician Al-Kindi (c. 801 –873 AD), who formally developed the method to break ciphers. Letter frequency analysis gained importance in Europe with the development of movable type in 1450 ...
A phoneme of a language or dialect is an abstraction of a speech sound or of a group of different sounds that are all perceived to have the same function by speakers of that particular language or dialect. For example, the English word through consists of three phonemes: the initial "th" sound, the "r" sound, and a vowel sound.
Probably occurred in the seventh century as evidenced by eighth century Anglo-Saxon missionaries' translation into Old Low German, "Gospel" as Gotspel, lit. "God news" not expected *Guotspel, "Good news" due to gōdspell > gŏdspell. /ĭŭ/ and /iu/ were lowered to /ĕŏ/ and /eo/ between 800 and 900 AD.
e. English orthography comprises the set of rules used when writing the English language, [1][2] allowing readers and writers to associate written graphemes with the sounds of spoken English, as well as other features of the language. [3] English's orthography includes norms for spelling, hyphenation, capitalisation, word breaks, emphasis, and ...
In linguistics, a consonant cluster, consonant sequence or consonant compound, is a group of consonants which have no intervening vowel. In English, for example, the groups /spl/ and /ts/ are consonant clusters in the word splits. In the education field it is variously called a consonant cluster or a consonant blend. [1][2]
Alliteration. Alliteration is the repetition of syllable -initial consonant sounds between nearby words, or of syllable-initial vowels, if the syllables in question do not start with a consonant. [1] It is often used as a literary device. A common example is " P eter P iper p icked a p eck of p ickled p e pp ers," in which the "p" sound is ...
This affects words such as lamb and plumb, as well as derived forms with suffixes, such as lambs, lambing, plumbed, plumber. By analogy with words like these, certain other words ending in /m/, which had no historical /b/ sound, had a silent letter b added to their spelling by way of hypercorrection. Such words include limb and crumb. [35]
The Old English fricatives /f, θ, s/ had voiceless and voiced allophones, the voiced forms occurring in certain environments, such as between vowels, and in words originating from the Kentish dialect (like vane, vinew, vixen, and zink), word-initially. In Early Middle English, partly by borrowings from French, they split into separate phonemes ...