Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
English phonology is the system of speech sounds used in spoken English. Like many other languages, English has wide variation in pronunciation, both historically and from dialect to dialect. In general, however, the regional dialects of English share a largely similar (but not identical) phonological system.
Pronunciation is the way in which a word or a language is spoken. This may refer to generally agreed-upon sequences of sounds used in speaking a given word or language in a specific dialect ("correct" or "standard" pronunciation) or simply the way a particular individual speaks a word or language. Words' pronunciations can be found in reference ...
This chart provides audio examples for phonetic vowel symbols. The symbols shown include those in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) and added material. The chart is based on the official IPA vowel chart. [1] The International Phonetic Alphabet is an alphabetic system of phonetic notation based primarily on the Latin alphabet.
The pronunciation with [f] was rare, and its use in current English is a historical accident resulting, according to Dobson, from the establishment of the spelling variant draft. [ 22 ] The words castle , fasten and raspberry are special cases where subsequent sound changes have altered the conditions initially responsible for lengthening.
The pronunciation of the digraph wh in English has changed over time, and still varies today between different regions and accents.It is now most commonly pronounced /w/, the same as a plain initial w , although some dialects, particularly those of Scotland, Ireland, and the Southern United States, retain the traditional pronunciation /hw/, generally realized as [], a voiceless "w" sound.
The following pronunciation respelling key is used in some Wikipedia articles to respell the pronunciations of English words. It does not use special symbols or diacritics apart from the schwa (ə), which is used for the first sound in the word "about". See documentation for { { Respell }} for examples and instructions on using the template.
Pronunciation respelling systems for English have been developed primarily for use in dictionaries. They are used there because it is not possible to predict with certainty the sound of a written English word from its spelling or the spelling of a spoken English word from its sound. So readers looking up an unfamiliar word in a dictionary may ...
English has borrowed many words from Greek, including a vast number of scientific terms. Where the original Greek had the letter θ (theta), English usually retained the Late Greek pronunciation regardless of phonetic environment, resulting in the presence of /θ/ in medial position ( anthem, methyl, etc.).