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A Germanic language, which originated from England, and is considered the leading language in international communication. For non-linguistic questions about the English language, visit one of our sister sites English Language & Usage or English Language Learners.

2 votes

Is there any case in English where a noun phrase is not the subject of a sentence, or a comp...

Sure. Noun phrases can occur in an adnominal '-s genitive construction: [the Queen of England]'s hat Rarely, noun phrases can occur as the complement of certain unusual adjectives: it was worth [th …
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3 votes
Accepted

"oo" in "poor", "door" and "doom"

According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, "door" actually appears to continue two OE words: Middle English merger of Old English dor (neuter; plural doru) "large door, gate," and Old English … Angl. 1483), and is considered by Luick as a northern lengthening of Old English u . …
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7 votes
Accepted

Morphophonology of changing adjectives to nouns

So the conditions that applied for this sound change in Latin do not apply on the surface in English. … See Greg Lee's answer to this English SE question: What are the rules to pronounce the suffix “-tion” in English, “/-tʃən/” or “ʃən”? …
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7 votes
Accepted

Which accents distinguish "golf" and "gulf"?

In American English, the “short o” sound has typically been rounded to the “cloth” vowel when it comes before /l/ followed by another consonant (or followed by the end of a word). … According to Wikipedia, a general merger of /ʌl/ and /ɔːl/ (“strut” + l and “cloth~thought” + l, as in "hull" and "hall") is known to occur in some accents of American English, but it is not a mandatory …
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6 votes

Why are the word-initial consonant clusters /tl/ and /dl/ absent in English?

This is only directly relevant to English in that a substantial portion of English vocabulary is borrowed from Latin or a descendant language; if Latin or French did have tl or dl onsets, they might have … French and English speakers is certainly influenced by the phonotactics. Word-medial /tl/ and /dl/ Of course, /tl/ and /dl/ do exist word-medially in English. …
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14 votes

What's the difference between /ɪ/ and /i(ː)/?

Broadly speaking, English /ɪ/ is pronounced as IPA [ɪ], and English /i(ː)/ is pronounced somewhere around IPA [i], [ɪi], [ɪj]. …
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3 votes

Homographs non-homophones

"Ea" is actually a common example of this in English. The historical reasons for this are fairly complicated. … The vowel in the verb comes from lengthening in Middle English of an originally short *e: this is expected to develop to Late Middle English [ɛː], which usually but not always turned into the "near" vowel …
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3 votes
Accepted

/ɹəʊd/ vs /ɹoʊd/ etc

) and /oʊ/ (for American English) is not meaningful on the phonetic level. … So far, I haven't seen a transcription of any accent of English that makes a contrast between /ɔʊ/ and /oʊ/. The distinction between [ɔ] and [ɒ] is similarly vague. …
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0 votes

If English adj → adv "-ly" suffix were inflectional, which grammatical category is it relate...

"tense, case, voice, aspect, person, number, gender, mood, animacy, and definiteness" are just examples, not an exhaustive list of what inflection can indicate. If -ly is considered to be an inflectio …
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5 votes

Why does "g" in Old English "boga" become "w" in Modern English "bow"?

The Old English g in these words evolved into a labialized velar glide [w] before being finally lost in the modern English forms. … In contrast, the OED records no Middle English spellings with ȝ or w for the descendants of Old English tā (toe). …
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5 votes

Verner's Law and 'ge-'

Wiktionary, I found a claim that Gothic at least allowed stacking of pre-verbs in such a way as to place them word-internally (and this seems to be backed up by other sources such as Phrasal Verbs: The English
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1 vote

English centering diphthongs - a myth?

Centering diphthongs are not a "myth" per se: they really exist/existed in some English accents. … It's true that many modern British English speakers use monophthongs, not centering diphthongs, in words like care, beer, pure. …
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1 vote

Grammatical Case for Noun Phrase in English

I agree with what Araucaria's answer says: it's not really possible to say that English common nouns have "cases" like Nominative, Accusative etc. … I think you've misunderstood how case works in a language like Latin or Old English, though. Possessed nouns can absolutely be in nominative case. …
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1 vote

Are the diphthongs "ae" and "ea" essentially identical?

Word-final DRESS is foreign to English phonotactics, which may be one reason why even "Ecclesiastical"-influenced English speakers don't tend to use word-final /ɛ/ in the pronunciation of English words … An example is "meat", from Old English mete [mete], Middle English mete [mɛːt(ə)]. …
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1 vote

Where does the spelling <ea> and <ee> in English come from?

For the spelling <ea>, one thing I forgot to mention that may be relevant is that Middle-English /ɛː/ was sometimes the reflex of the Old English long diphthong /æ͡ːɑ/, which was typically spelled <ea> … Another source of Middle-English /ɛː/ was Old English /æː/, which was spelled with the letter ash <æ> or with the <ae> digraph (my understanding is that these spellings were interchangeable in Old English
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