Indication of A Lost Phoneme
In many cases, the circumflex indicates the historical presence of a phoneme which over the course of linguistic evolution became silent, and then disappeared altogether from the orthography.
Read more about this topic: Use Of The Circumflex In French
Famous quotes containing the words indication of a, indication of, indication and/or lost:
“The first indication of a young person’s growing smarter is that he no longer understands the things which he used to consider quite intelligible and self-evident.”
—Franz Grillparzer (1791–1872)
“It is very certain that each man carries in his eye the exact indication of his rank in the immense scale of men, and we are always learning to read it. A complete man should need no auxiliaries to his personal presence.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Television could perform a great service in mass education, but there’s no indication its sponsors have anything like this on their minds.”
—Tallulah Bankhead (1903–1968)
“We enter church, and we have to say, “We have erred and strayed from Thy ways like lost sheep,” when what we want to say is, “Why are we made to err and stray like lost sheep?” Then we have to sing, “My soul doth magnify the Lord,” when what we want to sing is “O that my soul could find some Lord that it could magnify!””
—Thomas Hardy (1840–1928)