Sievers' Law and the history of semivowel syllabicity in Indo-European and ancient Greek.
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There are ten vowels: the five oral vowels (, , , , ) and their nasalized counterparts. There is slight variation, both allophonic and dialectal. Vowel length is phonemically distinctive. There are a number of combinations of a vowel with a semivowel or , the semivowel being initial or final.
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A handful of languages have a dental semivowel, which is written (see Place of articulation below).
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The same diacritic is placed under iota (ι̯) to represent the Proto-Indo- European semivowel as it relates to Greek grammar; upsilon with an inverted breve (υ̯) is used alongside digamma (ϝ) to represent the Proto-Indo-European semivowel '.Herbert Weir Smyth. Greek Grammar. par. 20 a: semivowels.
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2010, p.13 and thus appears to be another possible spirant + nasal consonant combination. The stop + semivowel consonant clusters θw, xw, and hw all appear to be restricted to the word medial environment, whereas the stop + semivowel consonant cluster sw appears to be the only stop + semivowel known to show up both word initially, as in swá̃la ('to be soft') and baswá ('to cut piece off'). The stop + liquid phoneme clusters θl, sl, and xl have all been found in the word initial and word medial environments.
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Confusions between b and v show that the Classical semivowel , and intervocalic partially merged to become a bilabial fricative (Classical semivowel became in Vulgar Latin, while became an allophone of in intervocalic position). Already by the 1st century AD, a document by one Eunus writes for and for .Horrocks, Geoffrey and James Clackson (2007). The Blackwell History of the Latin Language.
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In some languages, diphthongs are single phonemes, while in others they are analyzed as sequences of two vowels, or of a vowel and a semivowel.
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It is always in Portuguese, but in some regions of Brazil, it represents a nasalized semivowel , which nasalizes the preceding vowel as well: manhãzinha ("early morning").
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L-vocalization, in linguistics, is a process by which a lateral approximant sound such as , or, perhaps more often, velarized , is replaced by a vowel or a semivowel.
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Features of the voiced palatal approximant: The most common type of this approximant is glide or semivowel. The term glide emphasizes the characteristic of movement (or 'glide') of from the vowel position to a following vowel position. The term semivowel emphasizes that, although the sound is vocalic in nature, it is not 'syllabic' (it does not form the nucleus of a syllable). For a description of the approximant consonant variant used e.g.
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Features of the voiced velar approximant: The most common type of this approximant is glide or semivowel. The term glide emphasizes the characteristic of movement (or 'glide') of from the vowel position to a following vowel position. The term semivowel emphasizes that, although the sound is vocalic in nature, it is not 'syllabic' (it does not form the nucleus of a syllable). For a description of the approximant consonant variant used e.g.
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The Kozje-Bizeljsko dialect has transitional features to the Lower Carniolan dialects such as an originally preserved semivowel with a positionally conditioned a reflex of the long semivowel, and retention of pitch accent. The former acute accent is bimoraic, the circumflex is monomoraic, and original quantitative distinctions between vowels have largely been replaced by qualitative differences. It is characterized by the phonemic developments a > ɔ, u > ü, unaccented u, ə, and yat > i, and lowering of high vowels before r.Toporišič, Jože. 1992.
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In phonetics and phonology, a semivowel or glide is a sound that is phonetically similar to a vowel sound but functions as the syllable boundary, rather than as the nucleus of a syllable. Examples of semivowels in English are the consonants y and w, in yes and west, respectively. Written in IPA, y and w are near to the vowels ee and oo in seen and moon, written in IPA. The term glide may alternatively refer to any type of transitional sound, not necessarily a semivowel.
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Among other features, this group is characterized by pitch accent, extensive diphthongization (ei, ie, uo), an a-colored semivowel, shift of o > u, and partial akanye.Toporišič, Jože. 1992. Enciklopedija slovenskega jezika. Ljubljana: Cankarjeva založba, p. 25.
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A sign in the Seneca language on the Cattaraugus Reservation. This is also an unorthodox example of the use of capital letters in Seneca. /j/ is a palatal semivowel. After [s] it is voiceless and spirantized [ç].
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When ŭ was pronounced, it would follow a stressed vowel and stand in for semivowel u, as in words eŭ, aŭ, and meŭ, all spelled today without the breve. Once frequent, it survives today in author Mateiu Caragiale's name – originally spelled Mateiŭ (it is not specified whether the pronunciation should adopt a version that he himself probably never used, while in many editions he is still credited as Matei). In other names, only the breve was dropped, while preserving the pronunciation of a semivowel u, as is the case of B.P. Hasdeŭ.
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Some of these features such as akanye/yakanye, a debuccalized or lenited , a semivowel , and palatalized final in 3rd person forms of verbs are also present in modern Belarusian and some dialects of Ukrainian (Eastern Polesian), indicating a linguistic continuum.
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Features of the voiced labialized velar approximant: The type of approximant is glide or semivowel. The term glide emphasizes the characteristic of movement (or 'glide') of from the vowel position to a following vowel position. The term semivowel emphasizes that, although the sound is vocalic in nature, it is not 'syllabic' (it does not form the nucleus of a syllable). Some languages, such as Japanese and perhaps the Northern Iroquoian languages, have a sound typically transcribed as where the lips are compressed (or at least not rounded), which is a true labial–velar (as opposed to labialized velar) consonant.
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Semivowels can be centralized much like vowels; for instance, the semivowels corresponding to the close central vowels can be written as centralized palatal semivowels , or centralized velar semivowels . The transcription vs. may also denote a distinction in the type of rounding, with the former symbol denoting a semivowel with compressed rounding typical of front vowels, and the latter symbol denoting a semivowel with protruded rounding typical of central and back vowels, though an additional verbal clarification is usual in such cases, as the IPA does not provide any official means to distinguish sounds with compressed and protruded rounding.
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In the current orthography it is now written ƴ. In Xhosa it is used for the sound . In a handful of Australian languages, it represents a "dental semivowel". is used in Mandarin pinyin to write the vowel when it forms an entire syllable.
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All words, with the exception of a couple of interjections, begin with one consonant. The consonant can be a stop, nasal, or semivowel (that is, do not occur initially). Words can end in either a vowel or a consonant. The allowed word- final consonants are .
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After [h] it is voiceless , in free variation with a spirant allophone [ç]. After [t] or [k] it is voiced and optionally spirantized [j], in free variation with a spirant allophone . Otherwise it is voiced and not spirantized [j]. /w/ is a velar semivowel.
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Falling (or descending) diphthongs start with a vowel quality of higher prominence (higher pitch or volume) and end in a semivowel with less prominence, like in eye, while rising (or ascending) diphthongs begin with a less prominent semivowel and end with a more prominent full vowel, similar to the in yard. (Note that "falling" and "rising" in this context do not refer to vowel height; for that, the terms "opening" and "closing" are used instead. See below.) The less prominent component in the diphthong may also be transcribed as an approximant, thus in eye and in yard. However, when the diphthong is analysed as a single phoneme, both elements are often transcribed with vowel symbols (, ).
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Russian diphthongs all end in a non-syllabic , an allophone of and the only semivowel in Russian. In all contexts other than after a vowel, is considered an approximant consonant. Phonological descriptions of may also classify it as a consonant even in the coda. In such descriptions, Russian has no diphthongs.
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The Vietnamese pronunciation is in northern dialect or in southern dialect, in both cases, in one syllable. is the velar nasal found in the middle of the English word “singer”. Unlike in Vietnamese, this consonant is never found in initial position in English. is the semivowel found in the English word “win”.
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Traditional Chinese syllable structure In Chinese syllable structure, the onset is replaced with an initial, and a semivowel or liquid forms another segment, called the medial. These four segments are grouped into two slightly different components: ; Initial (ι): optional onset, excluding sonorants ; Final (φ): medial, nucleus, and final consonantMore generally, the letter φ indicates a prosodic foot of two syllables :; Medial (μ): optional semivowel or liquidMore generally, the letter μ indicates a mora :; Nucleus (ν): a vowel or syllabic consonant :; Coda (κ): optional final consonant In many languages of the Mainland Southeast Asia linguistic area, such as Chinese, the syllable structure is expanded to include an additional, optional segment known as a medial, which is located between the onset (often termed the initial in this context) and the rime. The medial is normally a semivowel, but reconstructions of Old Chinese generally include liquid medials ( in modern reconstructions, in older versions), and many reconstructions of Middle Chinese include a medial contrast between and , where the functions phonologically as a glide rather than as part of the nucleus. In addition, many reconstructions of both Old and Middle Chinese include complex medials such as , , and .
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When two words belonging to the same phrase are pronounced together, or two morphemes are joined in a word, the last sound in the first may be affected by the first sound of the next (sandhi), either coalescing with it, or becoming shorter (a semivowel), or being deleted. This affects especially the sibilant consonants , , , , and the unstressed final vowels , , .
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Since Old Croatian verb pisati meant both "to write" and "to paint", it is uncertain whether this verb was used to denote also a sculptural work and concordantly, if Plomin tablet inscription is a signature of the sculptor, or the Glagolitic text some secondarily written graffiti, written by some scribe. Reading of the text introduces some additional phonetic and orthographic difficulties — an unusual orthography appears for writing the participle pisalъ, where on the position of sound /a/ a semivowel 'ъ' is written (thus pisъlъ instead of pisalъ). Fučić argues whether it is phonetically possible for the author of this inscription to have mistaken the phonetic value of a semivowel with that of the full vowel /a/, i.e. that he might have replaced the signs due to the similarity of pronunciation.
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In most European languages written in the Latin script, such as in Romance and Germanic languages, appears almost exclusively in the digraph . In French, Occitan, Catalan and Portuguese, represents or ; in Spanish, it represents . replaces for before front vowels and , since in those languages represents a fricative or affricate before front vowels. In Italian represents (where is the semivowel allophone of ).
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Vowel breaking, or fracture, caused a front vowel to be split into a semivowel-vowel sequence before a back vowel in the following syllable. While West Norse only broke e, East Norse also broke i. The change was blocked by a v, l, or r preceding the potentially-broken vowel. Some or and or result from breaking of and respectively.
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This article discusses the phonological system of Standard Macedonian (unless otherwise noted) based on the Prilep-Bitola dialect. For discussion of other dialects, see Macedonian dialects. Macedonian possesses five vowels, one semivowel, three liquid consonants, three nasal stops, three pairs of fricatives, two pairs of affricates, a non-paired voiceless fricative, nine pairs of voiced and unvoiced consonants and four pairs of stops.
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Semivowels and approximants are not equivalent in all treatments, and in the English and Italian languages, among others, many phoneticians do not consider rising combinations to be diphthongs, but rather sequences of approximant and vowel. There are many languages (such as Romanian) that contrast one or more rising diphthongs with similar sequences of a glide and a vowel in their phonetic inventory (see semivowel for examples).
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Native Hindi speakers pronounce as in ( – , 'vow') and in ( – 'food dish'), treating them as a single phoneme and without being aware of the allophonic distinctions, though these are apparent to native English speakers. The rule is that the consonant is pronounced as semivowel in onglide position, i.e. between an onset consonant and a following vowel. However, the allophone phenomenon becomes obvious when speakers switch languages.
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An isolated t would be read as wo, for example. The only exception to restriction is m, which when written alone is the syllabic nasal. This may be a design feature, as historically the syllabic nasal derives from mu. However, the semivowel y is indicated by point 4, one of the vowel points, and the vowel combination is dropped to the bottom of the block.
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When two vowels come together, they are either separated by a glottal stop , fuse into a single vowel, or the first vowel reduces to a semivowel. In the latter case, the four front vowels reduce to and three of the back vowels reduce to , but is fronted to . However, there are /Cw/ and /Cj/ sequences which are not derived from vowel sequences. These are .
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In some dialects, particularly of western Germany, the phenomenon is preserved in many more forms (for example Luxembourgish stellen/gestallt, "to put", and Limburgish tèlle/talj/getaldj, "to tell, count"). The cause lies with the insertion of the semivowel between the verb stem and inflectional ending. This triggers umlaut, as explained above. In short stem verbs, the is present in both the present and preterite.
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Younger speakers of the Lwów dialect often pronounced the consonant <ł> as a semivowel [u̯] syllable-finally and word-finally. Unlike today's Standard Polish, however, the older articulation as a denti-alveolar [ɫ] was preserved before vowels (in words like pudełeczko ("box," diminutive) and łuk "bow"). The consonant before _, and before other vowels, was pronounced as [mɲ] . For example, Standard Polish [mʲut] was pronounced as [mɲut].
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According to the standard definitions, semivowels (such as ) contrast with fricatives (such as ) in that fricatives produce turbulence, but semivowels do not. In discussing Spanish, Martínez Celdrán suggests setting up a third category of "spirant approximant", contrasting both with semivowel approximants and with fricatives. Though the spirant approximant is more constricted (having a lower F2 amplitude), longer, and unspecified for rounding (viuda 'widow' vs. ayuda 'help'), the distributional overlap is limited.
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Falling tones can be heard in syllables which have two morae, e.g. those with a long vowel (okukóoká 'to sing'),Dutcher & Paster (2008), p.125. those with a short vowel followed by a geminate consonant (okubôbbá 'to throb'), those with a vowel followed by a prenasalised consonant (Abagândá 'Baganda people'), and those following a consonant plus semivowel (okulwâlá [okulwáalá] 'to fall sick'). They can also be heard on final vowels, e.g.
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Among other features, this group is characterized by monophthongal stressed vowels, an acute semivowel, pitch accent, standard circumflex shift, and two accentual retractions with some exceptions. It features narrowing of o and e in preaccentual position, akanye (reduction of o to a) in postaccentual position, and strong syncope. There is a partial development of g to , preservation of bilabial w, and general hardening of soft l and n.Toporišič, Jože. 1992.
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Two-syllable words with accent on the first syllable do not take stød, nor do closed monosyllables ending in a non-sonorant. In Standard Danish, stød is mainly found in words that have certain phonological patterns, namely those that have a heavy stressed syllable, with a coda of a sonorant or semivowel (i.e. words ending in vowel + ) or one of the consonant phonemes . This phonological structure is called "stød-basis" (or "" in the literature).
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In Spanish, á is an accented letter, pronounced just the way a is. Both á and a sound like /a/. The accent indicates the stressed syllable in words with irregular stress patterns. It can also be used to "break up" a diphthong or to avoid what would otherwise be homonyms, although this does not happen with á, because a is a strong vowel and usually does not become a semivowel in a diphthong.
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The first of the two vowels may be elided or, alternatively, the semivowel y may be inserted to keep the vowels apart: :: /tumẓin ula asngar/ → tumẓin ulasngar or tumẓin ula y asngar "barley as well as maize" ::/fukku anɣ/ → fukkanɣ or fukku y anɣ "set us free!" Less commonly, vowels /i/ and /u/ may change into y and w: /ddu-at/ "go ye!" (imperative plural masculine) is realized either as dduyat (with inserted y) or as ddwat.
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That must have happened earlier than in Biblical Hebrew since the resultant long vowels are not marked with the semivowel letters (bēt "house" was written bt, in contrast to Biblical Hebrew byt). The most conspicuous vocalic development in Phoenician is the so-called Canaanite shift, shared by Biblical Hebrew, but going further in Phoenician. The Proto-Northwest Semitic and became not merely as in Tiberian Hebrew, but . Stressed Proto-Semitic became Tiberian Hebrew ( in other traditions), but Phoenician .
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G. Bohas is following Ernest Renan, with the revolutionary linguistic movement MER (an acronym for the elements of his new theory, matrices, étymons, radicaux), which seeks to innove this traditional lexicon system of Arabic and, by extension, that of the set of Semitic languages. For Bohas (and his disciples), triliter or triconsonant radicals are nothing but expansions (by rearrangement, reduplication, or consonant or semivowel increase) of articulatory binary ethics (what we might in fact call "biconsonanttic roots").
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The term Pahlavi is said. to be derived from the Parthian language word parthav or parthau, meaning Parthia, a region just east of the Caspian Sea, with the -i suffix denoting the language and people of that region. If this etymology is correct, Parthav presumably became pahlaw through a semivowel glide rt (or in other cases rd) change to l, a common occurrence in language evolution (e.g. Arsacid sard became sal, zard>zal, vard>gol, sardar>salar etc.).
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The spirant approximant can only appear in the syllable onset (including word-initially, where the semivowel never appears). The two overlap in distribution after and : enyesar ('to plaster') aniego ('flood') and although there is dialectal and ideolectal variation, speakers may also exhibit other near-minimal pairs like abyecto ('abject') vs abierto ('opened'). One potential minimal pair (depending on dialect) is ya visto ('already seen') vs y ha visto ('and he has seen'). Again, it is not present in all dialects.
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The South Pohorje dialect is characterized by a non-tonal stress accent with different reflexes of old long vowels and vowels with a neocircumflex accent. It has long diphthongs of the type ei and ou, a characteristic e pronunciation of the old semivowel, open pronunciation of newly accented e and o, an o pronunciation of long a, nasalized j and nj as reflexes of soft n, and ar for syllabic r. Some new nasalized vowels have developed. Neuter nouns have become feminine.
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The phonological system of Standard Macedonian is based on the Prilep-Bitola dialect. Macedonian possesses five vowels, one semivowel, three liquid consonants, three nasal stops, three pairs of fricatives, two pairs of affricates, a non-paired voiceless fricative, nine pairs of voiced and unvoiced consonants and four pairs of stops. Out of all the Slavic languages, Macedonian has the most frequent occurrence of vowels relative to consonants with a typical Macedonian sentence having on average 1.18 consonants for every one vowel.
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Some languages, though, have a palatal approximant that is unspecified for rounding, and therefore cannot be considered the semivocalic equivalent of either or its unrounded counterpart . An example of such language is Spanish, in which the labialized palatal approximant consonant (not semivowel, which does not exist in Spanish) appears allophonically with rounded vowels in words such as ayuda 'help'. It is not correct to transcribe it with the symbols or ; the only suitable transcription is . See palatal approximant for more information.
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Iquitos is also attractive for its Amazonic Spanish, a dialect of Spanish spoken in the Amazon. The dialect is most noticeable in speech than in writing, such as [f] and [x] are allophones, (e.g., Juana is pronounced /fana/), especially when it is next to one or semivowel. (Los fríos de San Juan; Los fríos de San Fän), the double preposing and possessive genitive (De Antonio sus amigos; From Antonio his friends), and the preemption of articles against the names (Juana, Lä Fuana).
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Guaracy, Jandyra, Mayara – though placenames and loanwords derived from indigenous origins had the letter substituted for over time e.g. Nictheroy became Niterói. Usual pronunciations are , , and (the two latter ones are inexistent in European and Brazilian Portuguese varieties respectively, being both substituted by in other dialects). The letters and are regarded as phonemically not dissimilar, though the first corresponds to a vowel and the latter to a consonant, and both can correspond to a semivowel depending on its place in a word.
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While there are a number of similarities, diphthongs are not the same phonologically as a combination of a vowel and an approximant or glide. Most importantly, diphthongs are fully contained in the syllable nucleus while a semivowel or glide is restricted to the syllable boundaries (either the onset or the coda). This often manifests itself phonetically by a greater degree of constriction, but the phonetic distinction is not always clear. The English word yes, for example, consists of a palatal glide followed by a monophthong rather than a rising diphthong.
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The agentive suffixes are -ni' for the first person, second person, and third person singular feminine; -ni for the third person singular masculine; and -nit for the third person plural. To these may be added the marker for imminence, currently in progress, or emphasis, -yé' . All verb roots end in a consonant or semivowel. The meaning "to be" can be expressed in two ways: explicitly with the verb jɨm or tacitly through the various interrogative markers along with the personal pronouns, and occasionally with another verb, yit, which has the emphatic form yittí' , "I am".
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Since the 1930s, has been the tenth letter of the Russian alphabet, and in Russian, it represents , like the i in machine except after some consonants (see below). In Russian, it typically denotes a preceding soft consonant and, therefore, is considered the soft counterpart to (which represents ) but, unlike other "soft" vowels (, , and ), in isolation is not preceded by the semivowel. In Russian, the letter has been seen combined in the digraph (as were , and ) to represent before its existence around 1783. There still exist some apparent confusion in the transcription of some foreign words.
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The remainder of a syllable after the initial consonant is the final, represented in the Qieyun by several equivalent second fanqie spellers. Each final is contained within a single rhyme class, but a rhyme class may contain between one and four finals. Finals are usually analysed as consisting of an optional medial, either a semivowel, reduced vowel or some combination of these, a vowel, an optional final consonant and a tone. Their reconstruction is much more difficult than the initials due to the combination of multiple phonemes into a single class.
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In most dialects of British English, it is either an open-mid back rounded vowel or an open back rounded vowel ; in American English, it is most commonly an unrounded back to a central vowel . Common digraphs include , which represents either or ; or , which typically represents the diphthong , and , , and which represent a variety of pronunciations depending on context and etymology. In other contexts, especially before a letter with a minim, may represent the sound , as in 'son' or 'love'. It can also represent the semivowel as in choir or quinoa.
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The varieties of Uruguayan Portuguese share many similarities with the countryside dialects of the southern Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul, such as the denasalization of final unstressed nasal vowels, replacement of lateral palatal with semivowel , no raising of final unstressed , alveolar trill instead of the guttural R, and lateral realization of coda instead of L-vocalization. Recent changes in Uruguayan Portuguese include the urbanization of this variety, acquiring characteristics from urban Brazilian Portuguese such as distinction between and , affrication of and before and , and other features of Brazilian broadcast media.
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Influenced by the surrounding Mon–Khmer languages, words of the various Chamic languages of Southeast Asia, including Jarai, have become disyllabic with the stress on the second syllable. Additionally, Jarai has further evolved in the pattern of Mon–Khmer, losing almost all vowel distinction in the initial minor syllable. While trisyllabic words do exist, they are all loanwords. The typical Jarai word may be represented: :(C)(V)-C(C)V(V)(C) where the values in parentheses are optional and "(C)" in the cluster "C(C)" represents a liquid consonant or a semivowel .
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As wildcards, for {consonant} and for {vowel} are ubiquitous. Other common capital-letter symbols are for {tone/accent} (tonicity), for {nasal}, for {plosive}, for {fricative}, for {sibilant}, is particularly ambiguous. It has been used for 'stop', 'fricative', 'sibilant', 'sonorant' and 'semivowel'. The illustrations given here use, as much as possible, letters that are capital versions of members of the sets they stand for: IPA [n] is a nasal, [p] a plosive, [f] a fricative, [s] a sibilant, [l] a liquid, [r] both a rhotic and a resonant, and [ʞ] a click.
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Some languages have a voiced velar approximant that is unspecified for rounding, and therefore cannot be considered the semivocalic equivalent of either or its rounded counterpart . Examples of such languages are Catalan, Galician and Spanish, in which the unspecified for rounding voiced velar approximant consonant (not semivowel) appears as an allophone of . Eugenio Martínez Celdrán describes the voiced velar approximant consonant as follows: There is a parallel problem with transcribing the palatal approximant. The symbol may also be used when the voiced velar approximant is merely an allophone of the voiced velar fricative as, compared with , it is more similar to the symbol .
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Palatalization is phonetically realized as strong palatal friction or as slight vowel fronting in the syllable and occurs if a syllable margin is a palatal and sometimes when the margin is an alveolar consonant (with the exception of liquids) or bilabial stops. For example, 'to shake a rattle' and , 'a bird' are marked by the palatalization feature because they contain a syllable with a margin. The labialization feature is phonetically realized by the semivowel between a consonant margin and a vowel nucleus, as in 'razor'. It can also occur when the syllable margin is a velar stop, nasal or liquid.
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It was standardized in the United States as American National Standard System for the Romanization of Japanese (Modified Hepburn), but that status was abolished on October 6, 1994. Hepburn is the most common romanization system in use today, especially in the English-speaking world. The Revised Hepburn system of romanization uses a macron to indicate some long vowels and an apostrophe to note the separation of easily confused phonemes (usually, syllabic n from a following naked vowel or semivowel). For example, the name is written with the kana characters ju-n-i-chi-ro-u, and romanized as Jun'ichirō in Revised Hepburn.
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There is also an older type of the letter P (4) with lateral dash. Sign for the semivowel (7, 9) on Plomin tablet is not found on Glagolitic monuments before the 11th century or after the 13th century. Finally, there is a peculiar letter E (2, 3) occurring twice in this inscription and in both attestations demonstrates the same type with two horizontal lines intersecting the vertical hasta. Taking into account the paleographic development of that letter, it can be ascertained that E originally appears with two horizontal lines, which are subsequently reduced to one, which is subsequently reduced to a dot, which is itself finally elided.
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The stop + spirant clusters ʔθ, ʔs, and ʔh all show up word initially and word medially, whereas the stop + semivowel clusters dw and gw only show up word medially. The stop + liquid clusters bl and gl show up word initially and word medially. Spirant + stop clusters generally appear in both word initial and word medial position, these clusters include θg, sǰ, sg, hd, and hg, however the spirant + stop clusters sd and xd only appear word medially. These are all the spirant + stop clusters accounted for in the research of William Whitman, however, the spirant + stop cluster hk has been found to exist word medially, as in chéthka ('domestic cow').
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Few languages make a phonemic distinction between a word beginning with a vowel and a word beginning with a glottal stop followed by a vowel, since the distinction will generally only be audible following another word. However, Maltese and some Polynesian languages do make such a distinction, as in Hawaiian "fire" and / "tuna". Hebrew and Arabic forbid empty onsets. The names Israel, Abel, Abraham, Omar, Abdullah, and Iraq appear not to have onsets in the first syllable, but in the original Hebrew and Arabic forms they actually begin with various consonants: the semivowel in yisrāʔēl, the glottal fricative in heḅel, the glottal stop in ʔaḅrāhām, or the pharyngeal fricative in ʕumar, ʕabduḷḷāh, and ʕirāq.
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For example, misspell is often misspelled as mispell. The etymology of the word misspell is the affix "mis-" plus the root "spell", their bound morpheme has two consecutive s's, one of which is often erroneously omitted. The opposite of haplography is dittography. Other examples of words liable to be written haplographically in different languages are: German Rollladen ("shutters", from roll + Laden) which requires an uncommon sequence of three l‘s and is often spelt Rolladen, or Arabic takyīf تكييف ("air conditioning"), which would require a sequence of two semivowels y (one as a true semivowel, and another as a device to mark long ī) and is often spelt as takīf تكيف, with only one.
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If the vowel length is unknown, a breve as well as a macron are used in historical linguistics (Ā̆ ā̆ Ē̆ ē̆ Ī̆ ī̆ Ō̆ ō̆ Ū̆ ū̆). Some typefaces differentiate Cyrillic style (top) and Latin style breve (bottom) In Cyrillic script, a breve is used for Й. In Belarusian, it is used for both the Cyrillic Ў (semivowel U) and in the Latin (Łacinka) Ŭ. Ў was also used in Cyrillic Uzbek under the Soviet Union. The Moldovan Cyrillic alphabet uses a breve on Ӂ to represent a voiced postalveolar affricate (corresponding to before a front vowel in the Latin script for Moldovan). In Chuvash, a breve is used for Cyrillic letters Ӑ (A-breve) and Ӗ (E-breve).
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Schanidse (1982:26) lists a number of words which are written with Ⴅ 〈v〉 instead of the expected ႭჃ 〈oü〉. This seems to be an orthographical convention, as in all cited examples w is followed by a vowel and l (ႠႣႥႨႪႨ 〈advili〉 adwili "easy", ႷႥႤႪႨ 〈q’veli〉 q’weli "cheese", etc.), with just one exception (ႰႥႠ 〈rva〉 rwa "eight"). Romanized transcriptions of Old georgian conventionally reflect the different spellings of w, for example chwen, gwrit’i, tovli, veli. ;Semivowel y The initial vowel i- of a case suffix is realized as y- after a vowel, and this allophonic y has its own letter in the alphabet, for example ႣႤႣႠჂ ႨႤႱႭჃჂႱႠ 〈deday iesoüysa〉 deda-y iesu-ysa , phonemically /deda-i iesu-isa/ (mother-NOM Jesus-GEN) "the mother of Jesus".
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Belarusian seems to have also provided the model for Esperanto's diphthongs, as well as the complementary distribution of v (restricted to the onset of a syllable), and ŭ (occurring only as a vocalic offglide), although this was modified slightly, with Belarusian oŭ corresponding to Esperanto ov (as in bovlo), and ŭ being restricted to the sequences aŭ, eŭ in Esperanto. Although v and ŭ may both occur between vowels, as in naŭa ('ninth') and nava ('of naves'), the diphthongal distinction holds: vs. . (However, Zamenhof did allow initial ŭ in onomatopoeic words such as ŭa 'wah!'.) The semivowel j likewise does not occur after the vowel i, but is also restricted from occurring before i in the same morpheme, whereas the Belarusian letter i represents .
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Africa by Gerardus Mercator 1595, 'Fierro' is not yet on the prime meridian The name El Hierro, although spelled like the Spanish word for 'iron', is not related to that word. The H in the name of the metal is derived from the F of Latin ferrum (compare higa for 'fig'). The H in the name of the island dates back to the time in Old Spanish orthography when the distinction between the letters I and J was not yet established and a silent h was written before word-initial ie to ensure that the i was read as a semivowel, not as the consonant . The confusion with the name of the metal had effects on the international naming of the island.
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Esperanto typically has 22 to 24 consonants, depending on the phonemic analysis and individual speaker, five vowels, and two semivowels that combine with the vowels to form six diphthongs. (The consonant and semivowel are both written j, and the uncommon consonant is written with the digraph dz,Kalocsay & Waringhien (1985) , § 17, 22 which is the only consonant that doesn't have its own letter.) Tone is not used to distinguish meanings of words. Stress is always on the second-last vowel in fully Esperanto words unless a final vowel is elided, which occurs mostly in poetry. For example, ' "family" is , with the stress on the second i, but when the word is used without the final (), the stress remains on the second : .
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Verbs are conjugated with a subject prefix and with suffixes and infixes expressing aspect (continuous, immediate); tense (past, present, future) and mood (imperative, desiderative, interrogative). For example: :Past -nábé :Future -nátu' ::dubitative -náhitu' :Conditional -'náno' '' :Present ::imperfect -náka ::negative -kaná ::continuing -né' :Interrogative ::past -yáa ::future -pî' ::conditional -no'pî' ::present -ráa' :::negative -ka :Desiderative -iná- ("perhaps") :Planeative -ɨí' - ("to plan" an action) :Repetitive -pî- ("repeatedly") :Agentive -rít ("because", "due to") The imperative mood is formed by duplicating the last vowel of the verb stem, after the root final consonant or semivowel. The vowels [u] and [i] are pronounced as semivowels [w], [j] when duplicated after the final consonant. The past imperfect is formed by suffixing to the stem the duplicate of the last vowel in the stem plus [p]: (-VC-Vp).
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In segments that are repeated in a word – either by reduplication or by chance morphology – the second stop is often lenited into a semivowel or lost altogether. /j/ and /ʈ/ will become /y/, /b/ will become /w/, and /g/ will either become /w/ or Ø. This lenition can optionally occur at the beginning of a small number of nouns when the stem is preceded by a prefix ending in a vowel. There are also several instances of word-initial lenition of /g/ or /b/ to /w/, in cardinal directions, kin terms, and a few other isolated examples. At the beginning of verb stems, the underlying combination rrn will have the surface form of n, whereas an n followed by the phonemes l, rl, rr, r, n, or ny in any other context results in the deletion of the initial n.
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Where one word ended with a vowel (including a nasalized vowel, represented by a vowel plus m) and the next word began with a vowel, the former vowel, at least in verse, was regularly elided; that is, it was omitted altogether, or possibly (in the case of and ) pronounced like the corresponding semivowel. When the second word was or , a different form of elision sometimes occurred (prodelision): the vowel of the preceding word was retained, and the e was elided instead. Elision also occurred in Ancient Greek, but in that language, it is shown in writing by the vowel in question being replaced by an apostrophe, whereas in Latin elision is not indicated at all in the orthography, but can be deduced from the verse form. Only occasionally is it found in inscriptions, as in for .
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For example, le + hébergement becomes l'hébergement ('the accommodation'). The other kind of is called h aspiré ("aspirated ", though it is not normally aspirated phonetically), and does not allow elision or liaison. For example in le homard ('the lobster') the article le remains unelided, and may be separated from the noun with a bit of a glottal stop. Most words that begin with an H muet come from Latin (honneur, homme) or from Greek through Latin (hécatombe), whereas most words beginning with an H aspiré come from Germanic (harpe, hareng) or non-Indo-European languages (harem, hamac, haricot); in some cases, an orthographic was added to disambiguate the and semivowel pronunciations before the introduction of the distinction between the letters and : huit (from uit, ultimately from Latin octo), huître (from uistre, ultimately from Greek through Latin ostrea).
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Thus, the language of Middle Indo-Aryan is much before the Afokan Prakrit. On the basis of the borrowed words in Anatolian records and the language of the Indus seals as deciphered by S. R. Rao the date of MIA may go beyond 2000 BC. The transitional stage between OIA and MIA might have started in 2500 BC. There is good evidence that in the Old Indic or Indo-Aryan dialect to which the names belong, at the time of the documents, initial v, represented by b, was pronounced like v, while medial v kept its value of semivowel and was pronounced like w. For instance, Birasena(-Virasena), Birya (=Virya). Biryasura (=Viryasura)... 'It seems that in the language to which the names belong, just as in Middle Indic, the group pt had become tt, as in, for instance, Wasasatta(=Vasasapta), Sattawadza(=Saptavaja) and sausatti (=sausapti 'the son of susapti') Outside the learned sphere of Sanskrit, vernacular dialects (Prakrits) continued to evolve.
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Mary McGee (2007), Samskara, in The Hindu World (Editors: Mittal and Thursby), Routledge, , pages 342-343 The ancient Sanskrit texts provide numerous and divergent guidelines to the parents for choosing names. A boy's name by ancient conventions is typically of two or four syllables, starting with a sonant, a semivowel in the middle, and ending in a visarga. A girl's name is typically an odd number of syllables, ending in a long ā or ī, resonant and easy to pronounce.PV Kane, Samskara, Chapter VI, History of Dharmasastras, Vol II, Part I, Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, pages 238-254 Unpleasant, inauspicious, or words that easily transform into bad or evil words must be avoided, state the Gryhasutras, while the preferred names are those affiliated with a deity, virtues, good qualities, lucky stars, constellation, derivatives of the name of the father, or mother, or the place of birth, or beautiful elements of nature (trees, flowers, birds).
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The sound system of Kusaal is similar to that of its relatives; consonant clusters (except between adjacent words) occur only word-internally at morpheme-junctures, and are determined by the limited range of consonants which can appear in syllable-final position. Clusters arising from the addition of suffixes in derivation and flexion are either simplified or broken up by inserted ("svarabhakti") vowels. The roster of consonants includes the widespread West African labiovelar double-closure stops kp, gb, but the palatal series of the related languages (written ch/j in Dagbani and Hanga and ky/gy in Mampruli) fall in with the simple velars, as in neighbouring Farefare (Frafra, Gurene) and Moore. The reflexes of the palatal and labiovelar double- closure nasals of the related languages, [n] written ny and [ŋm] ŋm - are probably best analysed as a nasalised y and w respectively, but the scope of the nasalisation and the order of its onset with respect to the semivowel is variable.
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Mary McGee (2007), Samskara, in The Hindu World (Editors: Mittal and Thursby), Routledge, , pages 342-343 The ancient Sanskrit texts provide numerous and divergent guidelines to the parents for choosing names. Most recommend that the boy’s name be two or four syllables, starting with a sonant, a semivowel in the middle, and ending in a visarga. A girl's name is recommended to be an odd number of syllables, ending in a long ā or ī, resonant and easy to pronounce.PV Kane, Samskara, Chapter VI, History of Dharmasastras, Vol II, Part I, Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, pages 238-254 Unpleasant, inauspicious, or words that easily transform into bad or evil words must be avoided, state the Gryhasutras, while the preferred names are those affiliated with a deity, virtues, good qualities, lucky stars, constellation, derivatives of the name of the father, or mother, or the place of birth, or beautiful elements of nature (trees, flowers, birds).
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The form of the modern letter Y is derived from the Greek letter upsilon. The Romans first borrowed a form of upsilon – directly from the Greek alphabet, or from the Etruscan alphabet – as the single letter V, which represented both the vowel sound and the semivowel consonant sound . (In modern written Latin, V is typically distinguished from U.) This first loaning of upsilon into Latin is not the source of the Modern English Y (instead, it is the source of Modern English U, V, and W). The usage of the Greek Y form of upsilon as opposed to U, V, or W, dates back to the Latin of the first century BC, when upsilon was introduced a second time, this time with its "foot" to distinguish it. It was used to transcribe loanwords from the prestigious Attic dialect of Greek, which had the non-Latin vowel sound (as found in modern French cru (raw), or German grün (green)) in words that had been pronounced with /u/ in earlier Greek.
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