Development of English 6 Spelling, pronunciation, vocabulary

Some distinctive characteristics of PDE pronunciation stress-timing use of intonation to convey meaning (e.g. stress, question, doubt, certainty) relatively large number of diphthongs and triphthongs plosive /t/, /k/, /p/ lack of guttural fricative /x/ /θ/, /ð/ /I/ - /i:/ distinction the schwa sound /ǝ/ for some unstressed vowels

Some distinctive characteristics of PDE spelling non-phonetic ‘leftovers’ from previous eras (one, night, etc.) the use of final e and consonant doubling to indicate shortened or lengthened vowels the use of upper-case letters to indicate the first word in a sentence, proper names, emphasis the use of pairs of letters to indicate single phonemes (e.g. sh, ee, oo)

Changes in Spelling Shortening, but not noticeably in formal prose: may become so in the future A tendency towards American spelling where this is more rational. Probably stabilization because of world-wide use of English and the enormous amount of text already available

Pronunciation Assimilation Elision Strong and weak forms

Changes in pronunciation Raising intonation for statements. A tendency towards rhotic dialects a tendency to use full vowels rather than schwa.