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)
“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)
“Poetry is like making a joke. If you get one word wrong at the end of a joke, you’ve lost the whole thing.”
—W.S. Merwin (b. 1928)