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It's called a dieresis. It's used to show that the "a" and the "i" are not to be pronounced as a single sound. So it's pronounced something like "na-eve" and not like "knave" or with the "ai" rhyming with the "i" in "knives".
But in 50 years as a native English speaker/writer, I have never written it like that, and have rarely seen it so either.
Another ...
63
The two dots on the letter i are a French diacritic sign. The two dots in the French spelling naïf/naïve show that ai has not its normal pronunciation but is spoken as two separate vowels /a-i/. In English you can write naive or naïve.
The French term for the two dots on e/i/u is tréma.
The Greek term diaeresis means separation and refers to the separate ...
48
It's pronounced /spel/ in the audio clip.
Phonemically, English has two bilabial plosive consonants, /b/ and /p/.
Phonetically, these two sounds can be realized in more than one way. The relevant ones to our question are [b] (for /b/), and [pʰ] and [p˭] (for /p/).
[b] is voiced.
[pʰ] is aspirated and unvoiced.
[p˭] is unaspirated and unvoiced.
The ...
34
Short answer:
The p does not get doubled in 'hope' because it's followed by the silent/ magic e. It's called magic e because it's silent itself, but it often changes the pronunciation of the preceding syllable. It turns a vowel to a diphthong or a long vowel. The only common exceptions are words that end in ‹ve› (e.g. love, have).
Examples:
Hat (/hæt/) + e -...
28
It's called spoonerism.
Examples:
A blushing crow -> A crushing blow
A lack of pies -> A pack of lies
A well-boiled icicle -> A well-oiled bicycle
Bedding wells -> wedding bells
belly jeans -> jelly beans
A spoonerism is an error in speech in which corresponding consonants, vowels, or morphemes are switched between two words in a phrase.
Example: ...
28
There isn't a relatively simple explanation, I'm afraid. As you've pointed out, there are more exceptions-to-rules than than there are rules; however, there are some general guidelines that might help you:
before double consonants
before double consonants, 'i' is usually short regardless of its position in a word: as in bitten, hidden, miffed, bigger, piggy,...
23
In your examples
rollback
is a compound word consisting of the verb to roll and the preposition back.
It is similar to
turnoff
which is composed of to turn and off.
The past tenses are
rolled back
turned off
You may be confusing the nouns with the similar sounding verb phrases
Q: Did you roll back the rollback of the databases?
A: Yes, ...
23
"Caught up" is correct.
I'm not sure "catched" is ever correct.
Merriam-Webster lists it as "chiefly dialectal".
22
I think it is worth pointing out that perhaps the most common use of this diacritic to indicate diaresis in modern English is in the personal name Zoë, which is not pronounced to rhyme with "toe" but instead as "zo-ey".
21
𝑇𝐿;𝐷𝑅
'Lose' came from Old English (OE) word losian while 'loose' was taken from Old Norse around the thirteenth century. There was a process in OE through which s, f and th became voiced respectively to [z], [v] and [ð] when they occurred between voiced sounds i.e. between two vowels or a vowel and anther voiced sound. There was no phonemic contrast of ...
19
Basically the answer is that naïve is sometimes spelled with the diaresis because it is derived from French which spells it that way. It is actually very uncommon for native English speakers to spell it with the diaresis, largely because, as you've noticed, the diaresis is not normally a part of the English language. The vast majority of English keyboards ...
18
"Visualization" is the only correct spelling in American English.
"Visualisation" and "visualization" are both acceptable in British English although it is a common misconception that "visualization" is an Americanism and therefore incorrect.
Oxford resolutely prefers "ize" forms - see visualize in the British English Oxford Dictionary - and a lot of ...
16
It's really just a stylistic choice, as per this related ELU question, but most style guides would suggest you shouldn't use the apostrophe, and these days, that's what most people do...
I should also point out that if the apostrophe is used, it can't represent "possession/association" unless followed by another noun. You can say I was last year's winner, ...
16
Tenses always apply to verbs, so to see where to apply it, you need to figure out which part of the compound (or hyphenated) word is the verb.
"Rollback" is a compound word, consisting of the verb "roll" and the preposition "back", as Peter indicated. As such, "rolling" is what you are doing, and "back" indicates where you're rolling (as opposed to rolling ...
15
Because of the letter e at the end of the word hope.
There is no e at the end of mop. There is the word mope which in its present participle form is spelled moping - note the single p.
Similarly, there's the verb hop (no "e" at the end) which in its present participle form is spelled hopping - not the double p.
14
In some cases in English, the two dots indicate an umlaut, typically seen on loan-words (predominantly from languages like German and Swedish), to indicate a special pronunciation of the vowel:
ångström, Bön, doppelgänger, filmjölk, föhn wind, fräulein, Führer, gemütlichkeit, glögg, Gewürztraminer, Götterdämmerung, Gräfenberg spot, jäger, kümmel, pölsa, ...
14
Caught is the 'standard' past and past participle of catch now, but it wasn't always the case. The correct past and past participle of catch was catched. The current past and past participle caught, is by analogy with teach/taught.
Analogical change is a type of language change in which some forms are deliberately changed merely to make them look more like ...
11
The accepted answer by Damkerng is an excellent explanation, but I think it is also helpful to understand why it is pronounced this way, and as a native speaker of English I'd be happy to explain. In English we always strive for efficiency in pronunciation, and if we aspirated the /p/ as [ph] after such sounds as /s/, it would be rather difficult to do so in ...
10
"Loose" has probably always been pronounced with [s] - the Norse word that it was borrowed from is spelt with double "s".
"Lose" has been pronounced with [z] at least since Old English. (Between vowels, OE "s" was pronounced [z]. I use square brackets here because the s/z distinction in OE wasn't phonemically ...
9
Both are valid. learned is consistently more commonly used in American English:
In British English the difference has traditionally been much closer, with both being roughly equivalent, however since the 1940s, learned has become the dominant choice.
9
Yes, you can, but I would only write it if you want to transcribe an oral conversation. Which means, in spoken language it's common, but not in writing.
By adding the possessive tag Brian points to a problem: Janny's could also be use as possessive: "Janny's children", so that could be a bit confusing.
9
When a measurement is used right before the noun it measures, use a hyphen and the singular form of the unit of measurement:
I saw a 95-foot yacht in the harbor.
The 12-mile climb is too arduous for casual visitors.
The monument is in the 13.7-acre park's circular drive.
A dimension can also be included with another hyphen:
I saw a 95-foot-long ...
8
While @DecapitatedSoul's answer may be linguistically correct, my answer is much more similar to how @CowperKettle's describes things. It's based on how I learned English and phonics in a English language elementary school in Canada in the 1960s.
In general, English vowels come in two flavours (note the non-American spelling). Those are: short and long. ...
7
The general rule for noun phrases like this is to separate them by spaces.
However, many* specific pairs of words have exceptions and are either written hyphenated, or are even merged into a new word with no separation at all. For example, "copy editor" is in the process of moving from unhyphenated noun phrase through hyphenated noun phrase to new word, ...
7
If it's a short vowel sound and a single consonant, then you double the consonant to signify that the vowel sound is supposed to stay short:
map > mappable
hit > hittable
cancel > cancellable
Otherwise (if the vowel is already long, or if there is more than one consonant already) you don't need to double anything, because the vowel sound won't change ...
6
The correct one is, as SF says, absorption, not absorbtion.
Absorb has a B but when the suffix -tion is appended to it, the second B changes to P. So why does it happen?
Why is absorption spelt with a P
Human vocal tract is designed in such a way that consonant clusters that differ in voice are difficult to pronounce, because changing from voiced to ...
6
As is ever the case with style in English, there is no hard rule except to be consistent within the parameters of the style guide you are using. That said, I know the Chicago, MLA, and Associated Press manuals all say not to use the apostrophe to pluralize dates, contradicting your contradictory source regarding American usage.
The common explanation behind ...
6
The important information in this thread is from Etymonline.com. They get their information from the famous English linguist Otto Jespersen:, who said this
The reason for writing I is ... the orthographic habit in the middle ages of using a 'long i' (that is, j or I) whenever the letter was isolated or formed the last letter of a group; the numeral 'one' ...
answered May 12 '17 at 14:05
Araucaria - Not here any more.
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6
Each English vowel letter has two main sounds, one of which is called the "short" vowel sound and the other of which is called the "long" vowel sound. The short vowel sounds are the sounds in the words "bat", "bet", "bit", "bot", and "but" (in IPA /æ, ɛ, ɪ, ɑ or ɒ, ʌ/); the long vowel sounds are the same as the name of the letter (in IPA /eɪ, i, aɪ, oʊ, ju/,...
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