Use of The Circumflex in French - Indication of A Lost Phoneme

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.

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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.
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    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.
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    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.
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    This melancholy London—I sometimes imagine that the souls of the lost are compelled to walk through its streets perpetually. One feels them passing like a whiff of air.
    William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)