I suppose the presence of a premodifier might be relevant to the use of determiners in some cases, but I don’t see any general pattern along the lines of the one that you are suggesting. Is it absolutely possible for an uncountable noun to come after one or more premodifiers but no determiner? In fact, many common phrases are of this form: “hot water”, “cold water”, “whole milk”, “good advice”, “wet sand”. (Uncountable noun phrases can be used without a determiner whether in an anonymous or an oda.generalized context. I.e. the grammar of “noun phrase” can be interpreted in a specific context because of their meaning). “Good advice is valuable”, “Cold water is a common beverage” or “Alex gave you good advice that will help you solve your problem”, “I splashed cold water on my hands. Definitely not healthy.” “for the second pair of sentences here, the non-count indefinite determiner “some” could be used, although it is optional: “Alex gave you some good advice that will help you solve your problem”, “I splashed some cold water on my hands.” Is “some” useful for calculating “some.”? “A

wealth of X”, with the indefinite article, is just an idiom that can be used whether or not “wealth” takes a premodological: “George Curzon, for example, possessed a wealth of governmental and administrative experience” ( Stewards of the Nation’s Art: Contested Cultural Authority, 1890-1939, by Andrea Geddes Poole, 2010; p. 70).

The word wealth can be used with an optional premodifier and no determiner: “a person of great wealth,” “they possess great wealth”.

Which are the most highly valuable words in English today?

triplet :

A set of three similar things.

• Where should I get a triplet or quad of Aces? ‘
• ‘It constitutes a triplet, the first number representing the position, the second and third the transmission. ‘
• ‘DNA, RNA, and protein triplets or pairs were united on the basis of a high degree of similarity as detected by the appropriate blast algorithm or on the basis of annotation. ‘,

(Oxford Dictionaries)

For some reason, nobody posted this as an answer yet even though Theta30 mentioned it in 2011 in a comment.

Reduced vowels usually occur in unstressed syllables

In English, a process called “vowel reduction”, may be very helpful for pronunciation of a vowel during a syllable without any effect or stress. The letter e, may correspond to the “disreduced” vowel sounds transcribed as or . Not All unstressed words are pronounced with reduced vowels. If the letter “E” in an unstressed syllable corresponds to a vowel (without any specific words) you can find it in a dictionary as a reference.

Reduced vowels and “precipitation”

The word “precipitation” has secondary stress on the second syllable, and primary stress on the second-to-last syllable, but no stress on the first syllable. Why most syllables end with a reduced vowel?

On the other hand, it’s not necessarily easy for a native English speaker to notice the distribution of reduced vowels because the pronuciation of reduced vowels is variable, and vowel reduction is rarely explicitly taught to native English speakers when they are learning how to read, because they tend to do it naturally.

What causes my ambiguity on my question “Declaration”?

One major area of variation that is fairly well-known is the presence or absence of what is called weak vowel merger. Basically, some speakers feel like they can’t tell the difference between an “h” sound and an “” sound in a syllable with reduced vowel, or they feel that all syllables with a reduced vowel have “”: these speakers are considered to have this merger. Is this common in American English? Even accents that don’t have a general merger may differ in which reduced vowel they use in particular words, or may allow either reduced vowel to be used in certain contexts. The

convention in most modern dictionaries is as follows: for

• accents that have two main reduced vowel sounds, one of them (the one that frequently corresponds to a written “e” or “i”) is represented with the same symbol as the unreduced vowel found in words like “bit” (in

• “” represents accents that have only one main reduction vowel sound, and not more than one vowel.

In the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) there is a letter located

on the head of

the upper left (separately from the usual English word “prspted-h”) letter. It is not noted that it is the same as the normal English letter (separately -l) on the upper left. This is used by the OED to signify a reduced vowel that can be realized either as // or as // in British

Where you can see the pronunciation without a reduced vowel in the first syllable for American English, and it has the vowel /i/ (this is the pronunciation with the “free” vowel that 1006a mentioned in a comment)? Pronunciations with a vowel similar to may exist, but as you have found, most dictionary-makers either don’t consider these pronunciations common enough or don’t consider them standard enough to include in their transcriptions.

Effects where the letter “E” can appear

in an unstressed syllable,./

occurs in short unstressed syllables, and // occurs in short unstressed words. /E/ does not occur. the word ends in an ” consonant”: the word tectonic, technique, sectarian, centripetal, mentality or tempestuous.]

In words with ex-, the first syllable is open, but the vowel

may be reduced anyway when it is unstressed. see the answers for How can I explain correctly a definition of “ex”?

I believe there is a similar variation in the pronunciation of the vowels in the prefix en-/em in some words where it is unstressed. E.g. The word embed is transcribed by Merriam-Webster and the American Heritage Dictionary with //.

In word-final closed syllables, sometimes

In words like project, the unstressed vowel in the final syllable is not always reduced. Merriam-Webster indicates project can have // or // in the second syllable, and progress can have // or // (I don’t know why they transcribe the reduced vowels differently; maybe the identity of the preceding consonant is relevant).

Is the preference for the en demh for compound modifiers at the point where it’s included spaces? How do I

hyphenate an open-form

compound word with another that should be hyphenated?

I’d thus recommend punctuating your examples as “Denver-based company” and “Mountain View, California–based company” (if you choose not to rephrase).

What are the caveats to this guideline?

1. Some people seem to believe that you must rephrase. What does Lambie feel like with his answer to this question? What are some reasons why I shouldn’t use “Denver, Colorado” in compound adjectives with the first part ending in “-based”?

2. I am not sure exactly what the history of using the en dash this way is, or how widely this usage is accepted or recognized. In a discussion from 2014 about the Wikipedia style guide, Tony writes and lists that Using an en dash with exactly the

   same meaning as a hyphen, is almost exclusively a US invention – and a recent one at that. It has been extensively tested, and is shown as an option in CMOS12 (1969), where the examples (at 5.3) were shown. It is not to be used as an option, it has to be a simple addition, and it should be marked as a standard. 91) are all with prefixes (“post-Civil War period”) don’t have two more or less equal elements combined (“New York–London flight”). , but there’s no reference of suffixes, or examples of such a use, though prefixes are specifically mentioned in Table 6. With examples there and at 5.91.

   Only with CMOS16 (2010, current edition) do we get two suffix examples (at 6.80). The first three examples in that section: “the post-World War II years” “English country singing” and “country” influenced”. “it should be used sparingly, and only when a more elegant solution is unavailable”

Is the preference for the en demh for compound modifiers at the point where it’s included spaces? How do I

hyphenate an open-form

compound word with another that should be hyphenated?

I’d thus recommend punctuating your examples as “Denver-based company” and “Mountain View, California–based company” (if you choose not to rephrase).

What are the caveats to this guideline?

1. Some people seem to believe that you must rephrase. What does Lambie feel like with his answer to this question? What are some reasons why I shouldn’t use “Denver, Colorado” in compound adjectives with the first part ending in “-based”?

2. I am not sure exactly what the history of using the en dash this way is, or how widely this usage is accepted or recognized. In a discussion from 2014 about the Wikipedia style guide, Tony writes and lists that Using an en dash with exactly the

   same meaning as a hyphen, is almost exclusively a US invention – and a recent one at that. It has been extensively tested, and is shown as an option in CMOS12 (1969), where the examples (at 5.3) were shown. It is not to be used as an option, it has to be a simple addition, and it should be marked as a standard. 91) are all with prefixes (“post-Civil War period”) don’t have two more or less equal elements combined (“New York–London flight”). , but there’s no reference of suffixes, or examples of such a use, though prefixes are specifically mentioned in Table 6. With examples there and at 5.91.

   Only with CMOS16 (2010, current edition) do we get two suffix examples (at 6.80). The first three examples in that section: “the post-World War II years” “English country singing” and “country” influenced”. “it should be used sparingly, and only when a more elegant solution is unavailable”

Is the preference for the en demh for compound modifiers at the point where it’s included spaces? How do I

hyphenate an open-form

compound word with another that should be hyphenated?

I’d thus recommend punctuating your examples as “Denver-based company” and “Mountain View, California–based company” (if you choose not to rephrase).

What are the caveats to this guideline?

1. Some people seem to believe that you must rephrase. What does Lambie feel like with his answer to this question? What are some reasons why I shouldn’t use “Denver, Colorado” in compound adjectives with the first part ending in “-based”?

2. I am not sure exactly what the history of using the en dash this way is, or how widely this usage is accepted or recognized. In a discussion from 2014 about the Wikipedia style guide, Tony writes and lists that Using an en dash with exactly the

   same meaning as a hyphen, is almost exclusively a US invention – and a recent one at that. It has been extensively tested, and is shown as an option in CMOS12 (1969), where the examples (at 5.3) were shown. It is not to be used as an option, it has to be a simple addition, and it should be marked as a standard. 91) are all with prefixes (“post-Civil War period”) don’t have two more or less equal elements combined (“New York–London flight”). , but there’s no reference of suffixes, or examples of such a use, though prefixes are specifically mentioned in Table 6. With examples there and at 5.91.

   Only with CMOS16 (2010, current edition) do we get two suffix examples (at 6.80). The first three examples in that section: “the post-World War II years” “English country singing” and “country” influenced”. “it should be used sparingly, and only when a more elegant solution is unavailable”

What does happen to a person who uses “do” in English? English auxiliaries are characterized by the “NICE” grammatical properties, which are described by this series of slides by Geoff Pullum.

• I: can take Initial position in Interrogatives C:
• “Code” interpretation of COMPlement ellipsis (your example
• shows ellipsis) E: special emphasized forms when stressed Auxiliaries are
• normally classified as verbs and hence

called auxiliary verbs although I’ve heard from Greg Lee that there are some theories of syntax that treat them as not being verbs… As is true with the expressions (for example)

What does happen to a person who uses “do” in English? English auxiliaries are characterized by the “NICE” grammatical properties, which are described by this series of slides by Geoff Pullum.

• I: can take Initial position in Interrogatives C:
• “Code” interpretation of COMPlement ellipsis (your example
• shows ellipsis) E: special emphasized forms when stressed Auxiliaries are
• normally classified as verbs and hence

called auxiliary verbs although I’ve heard from Greg Lee that there are some theories of syntax that treat them as not being verbs… As is true with the expressions (for example)

According to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the word blue, a loanword from “Anglo-Norman blew, bliu, blu, blwe, bluw”, had a number of spellings that were used during the Middle English period, among them : eME

blu, ME bleu, ME bleuh, ME bluwe, ME blw, ME blyu, ME blyw, ME–15 blwe, ME–16

The Wikipedia article about the term blue moon uses a verse from the pamphlet “Rede me and be nott wrothe, for I say no thynge but trothe” that was published in 1528: Yf they saye the mone is belewe I say it is true (These lines also appear in the OED entry on moon as the earliest and only quotation for

the now-obsolete expression “to say that the moon is blue”, which the OED compares

For the word “true,” the OED entry for the word “true” has more details about the pronunciation of that word

in Middle English: the. Forms show the usual development of Old English ow to the Middle English diphthong u, w (with long close ). By the 10th cent. This diphthong had fallen together (perhaps as/U/) with the reflex of Old French u (i.e., 4-// /). This diphthong had been connected (proximally as/f//*/) with the reflex of Old French u (like the u/f/ /u/) and this diphthong had fallen together; perhaps as /u/). (/y/), giving rise to Middle English, and later (>). Forms tru, true, etc.

The symbol represents a diphthong that is not found in most common British accents, but that consists of a vowel, like the “ih” in the modern English word “kit” followed by an “oo” or “w”-like offglide, like at the end of the /i/ dipthong in the modern English word “cow”. I have also seen this diphthong transcribed as iu, , and i (“Diphthongs”, English Language and Linguistics Online ). The IPA symbols u00ab, i, and etc.u00bb and u00ab and uu00bb refer to theoretically adjacent and in practice actually overlapping areas of the “vowel space”, so the variation in transcription mentioned here doesn’t actually correspond to much if any difference in the sounds that are being referred to.

In Middle English the consonants /b/ and /l are pronounced about the same as they are now.

Silent s

I am more uncertain about the pronunciation of the first and last s. In Middle English, the letter could represent a number of sounds: an unreduced short vowel /e/, one of the long vowels /e/ or//, the schwa //, or no sound at all (a “silent e” as in many modern English words).

When word-final schwa was lost in English have In’t read most of it? Isn’t the overall trend of word final schwa loss noncontroversial? Minkova says:

there is no scholarly disagreement on the full-blown progress of final schwa loss from the 12th century onwards. What is the best way to reduce or minimize in your context? Inflective final vowels are more likely to reduce or apocope than regular vowels. The loss of schwa in word-final position, both inflectional and stem-final, was more advanced in the northern dialect areas, where by the mid 14th-century its realization would have been an archaism. The insertion of unetymological is a good test for the instability of base-final. Let is introduce one of the bases. The Ormulum, an autograph manuscript dated c. 1180, written in Lincolnshire, shows a number of nominatives in in nouns which had no final in OE: ax e OE x ‘axe’, bliss e OE bliss, wund e OE wund ‘wound’. In the southern dialects apocope spread more slowly, with inflectional’s leading the way. When it comes to nouns, it is consistent only in monolingual nouns in prepositional phrases. The dialectal details are much discussed in the literature (see Minkova 1991: Ch. 2; Fulk 2012: 30). Of interest in the context of the overall history of the change is that at the beginning of the 15th c, the idea of the system had only been realised earlier, rather than before. the realization of schwa in word-final position in base forms of nouns in all dialects had become obsolete. This allows us to posit an active constraint on the distribution of /-/ as defined in (3):

(3) */-/#: Avoid the realization of schwa in word-final position

Based on this information it seems that the final in was most likely silent and did not constitute a distinct syllable, since the passage it appears in seems to have been written in the 1500s, not only soon after the 12th century but well past Chaucer’s time also.

“The second is puzzling, since it is not consistent with the etymological origins of the word. Basically, “The tenth” refers to “The seventeenth” while “Near the end line”. Is it possible that it was an inserted unetymological silent letter, somewhat like the examples given by Minkova, although it does not occur in word-final position like these examples. If the first ff somehow corresponds to some actual vowel sound, I would guess that the schwa would be most likely.

The pronunciation of the word

in a passage seems to me that the pronunciation of the word in this passage was most likely monosyllabic /bliu/, so I wouldn’t recommend trying to break the word into syllables at all. If you are making a distinction between The Netherlands and Belgium, which you should consider as “Belewe”? The /l/ falls in the same syllable as the following diphthong /iu/: even if there was some kind of vowel preceding it, that vowel would have almost certainly been unstressed, based on the word’s etymology and the rhyme with true. E.g.: Is it about an idea or a rule I should follow? things like /bel. E.g. iu = be/. E.g. liu/ seem completely impossible to me; and while I’m not confident enough to completely rule out /bliu/, (whose syllables would be divided as belewe), it seems less probable to me than /bliu/ belewe.

Which is my all time best shot..? I know enough about Middle English and I want to give an answer that covers all spelling variants of the Middle English audio system, but I don’t know about the Difference spelling variants all the way thar what I can say without mentioning the differences.

When you arrive in a full answer that talks about things like what the unusual spelling of blue in this particular document, with instead of, is most likely to have corresponded to in terms of pronunciation, you may have to get in touch with professors or other kinds of experts who seriously studied Middle English phonology and paleography.

My question

about the etymology of the blue moon in Wikipedia is something about it. (Notify me when I add the question on Wikipedia)

What is a good rule of thumb for a successful story?

Reduced vowels usually occur in unstressed syllables

In English, a process called “vowel reduction”, may be very helpful for pronunciation of a vowel during a syllable without any effect or stress. The letter e, may correspond to the “disreduced” vowel sounds transcribed as or . Not All unstressed words are pronounced with reduced vowels. If the letter “E” in an unstressed syllable corresponds to a vowel (without any specific words) you can find it in a dictionary as a reference.

Reduced vowels and “precipitation”

The word “precipitation” has secondary stress on the second syllable, and primary stress on the second-to-last syllable, but no stress on the first syllable. Why most syllables end with a reduced vowel?

On the other hand, it’s not necessarily easy for a native English speaker to notice the distribution of reduced vowels because the pronuciation of reduced vowels is variable, and vowel reduction is rarely explicitly taught to native English speakers when they are learning how to read, because they tend to do it naturally.

What causes my ambiguity on my question “Declaration”?

One major area of variation that is fairly well-known is the presence or absence of what is called weak vowel merger. Basically, some speakers feel like they can’t tell the difference between an “h” sound and an “” sound in a syllable with reduced vowel, or they feel that all syllables with a reduced vowel have “”: these speakers are considered to have this merger. Is this common in American English? Even accents that don’t have a general merger may differ in which reduced vowel they use in particular words, or may allow either reduced vowel to be used in certain contexts. The

convention in most modern dictionaries is as follows: for

• accents that have two main reduced vowel sounds, one of them (the one that frequently corresponds to a written “e” or “i”) is represented with the same symbol as the unreduced vowel found in words like “bit” (in

• “” represents accents that have only one main reduction vowel sound, and not more than one vowel.

In the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) there is a letter located

on the head of

the upper left (separately from the usual English word “prspted-h”) letter. It is not noted that it is the same as the normal English letter (separately -l) on the upper left. This is used by the OED to signify a reduced vowel that can be realized either as // or as // in British

Where you can see the pronunciation without a reduced vowel in the first syllable for American English, and it has the vowel /i/ (this is the pronunciation with the “free” vowel that 1006a mentioned in a comment)? Pronunciations with a vowel similar to may exist, but as you have found, most dictionary-makers either don’t consider these pronunciations common enough or don’t consider them standard enough to include in their transcriptions.

Effects where the letter “E” can appear

in an unstressed syllable,./

occurs in short unstressed syllables, and // occurs in short unstressed words. /E/ does not occur. the word ends in an ” consonant”: the word tectonic, technique, sectarian, centripetal, mentality or tempestuous.]

In words with ex-, the first syllable is open, but the vowel

may be reduced anyway when it is unstressed. see the answers for How can I explain correctly a definition of “ex”?

I believe there is a similar variation in the pronunciation of the vowels in the prefix en-/em in some words where it is unstressed. E.g. The word embed is transcribed by Merriam-Webster and the American Heritage Dictionary with //.

In word-final closed syllables, sometimes

In words like project, the unstressed vowel in the final syllable is not always reduced. Merriam-Webster indicates project can have // or // in the second syllable, and progress can have // or // (I don’t know why they transcribe the reduced vowels differently; maybe the identity of the preceding consonant is relevant).