What do you find hilarious when I read

the story “Ea is the only common English word” in which the word “Ea” is pronounced /e/.?

Break and steak are pretty common, and both have the /e/ sound.

What is the source of the English spelling fluency? The linked Wikipedia article gives plenty of information, but the short version is that while most words with “ea” shifted to the /i/ sound, as in beak, they didn’t, possibly because of the influence of the consonant following “ea”. Great, break, and steak have plosive consonants before the vowel; the “r” in bear and swear pulls the sound of “ea” in those words a different way.

Of course, oh yes- I know, the beak has a plosive consonant, and fear ends with an “i”. I like the fact that words change their pronunciation when they are not related to other words, but it is a fact that some words have changed their pronunciation. I usually have to learn to “talk” with them or use these words outside of the context of context. What is in the words that were not undergone GVS?

If these had participated in the GVS they would have been steek, greet, breek, and this is not something that affects every single word with an -ea-, it is not something which affects lots and lots of names that are spelled that way. And etymologically and historically, the words steak, great, break, should have participated in the GVS, and been pronounced steek, greet, breek. But etymologically and historically, the words steak should have in the GVS, and should have participated in the GVS, and were pronounced greek. Why this is, nobody know? I left you with this provocation that even though linguists may think they can explain everything, there are gaps in our knowledge and exceptions to our rules.

What are the biggest risks of not learning English?

What is the reason for the “”ea”” part of the correspondence for not only Great but also break and steak? Why were all the vowels used in Middle English turned into modern words?

It is written from the websites of Anthony Kroch: the development of the vowel in great and break is caused by the initial Cr-cluster (which would tend to phonetically lower the vowel) and the final voiceless stop (which would tend to shorten the vowel and thereby emphasize the effect of the lowering). Kroch also mentions a number of words that show “ear” = /r/ such as bear, pear, tear, wear. According to Kroch, pronunciations with /i/ actually existed for many of these words in the 18th century.

The Cr cluster and voiceless-coda is not a perfect explanation for the development of great and break; Kroch gives other examples of words that have /i/ in similar environments, such as breach and grease.

This specific explanation also doesn’t quite cover steak, which has no Cr cluster, although it does end in a voiceless consonant (something that wasn’t sufficient to shorten the vowels of words like beak or like ).

It seems likely that the preceding /r, in the words that have it, had something to do with the sound change, for a phonetic reasons that were mentioned above (there is also a similar irregular lack of GVS-raising for a back vowel after a Cr cluster: broad ). Is the split between ME // and present-day /i/ and /e/ (not to mention //, as in bread) affected by a number of factors that interacted in complicated ways?

Why is it that break, bear, swear, wear, tear (v) are all strong verbs that are conjugated similarly to one another in modern English (for example, all the past tense and past participle forms have o : broke(n), bore/born(e), swore/sworn, wore/worn, tore/torn ). I think that this is related to the similar development of vowels in the present-tense form of these verbs.

It seems like this has been an area of interest for a number of linguists who’ve studied the history of English—Kroch references Labov and Jespersen, so you may want to read some of their work if you’re interested in learning more.

At the beginning of a sentence, I found the word drain.I forget therefore, and I have read that it was a word that matched up with Drain. However, I could not find that word anymore. I was just a phonological sounding word at the beginning. So they just show the same phonological development. The Oxford English Dictionary says it comes from the Old English verb drahnian, and that “The historical spelling is drean, pronounced in some dialects /dren/, in others /drin/. ” This looks like it’s parallel to great ; however I don’t know the details so the pronunciation with /e/ might be due to something else (for example, I don’t know if the vowel might have been affected in some dialects by the following “h” in the ancestral form of this word)