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While the Council for German Orthography considers ä, ö, ü, ß distinct letters, [4] disagreement on how to categorize and count them has led to a dispute over the exact number of letters the German alphabet has, the number ranging between 26 (considering special letters as variants of a, o, u, s ) and 30 (counting all special letters ...
In an alphabetic writing system, a silent letter is a letter that, in a particular word, does not correspond to any sound in the word's pronunciation. In linguistics, a silent letter is often symbolised with a null sign U+2205 ∅ EMPTY SET. Null is an unpronounced or unwritten segment.
H (when not part of a cluster) is now rendered with х or omitted (when silent); it was historically often rendered with г (g), as in the name of Heinrich Heine (Russian: Генрих Гейне). The Cyrillic letters ы and щ are not used.
The modern German alphabet consists of the twenty-six letters of the ISO basic Latin alphabet : German uses letter-diacritic combinations ( Ä/ä, Ö/ö, Ü/ü) using the umlaut and one ligature ( ẞ/ß (called eszett (sz) or scharfes S, sharp s)), but they do not constitute distinct letters in the alphabet.
The kn and gn letter combinations usually indicate a Germanic origin of the word. In Old English, k and g were not silent when preceding n . Cognates in other Germanic languages show that the k was probably a voiceless velar plosive in Proto-Germanic. For example, the initial k is not silent in words such as German Knecht which is a cognate of ...
For the distinction between [ ], / / and , see IPA § Brackets and transcription delimiters. The phonology of Standard German is the standard pronunciation or accent of the German language. It deals with current phonology and phonetics as well as with historical developments thereof as well as the geographical variants and the influence of ...
Umlaut (diacritic) Umlaut ( / ˈʊmlaʊt /) is a name for the two dots diacritical mark ( ̈) as used to indicate in writing (as part of the letters ä , ö , and ü ) the result of the historical sound shift due to which former back vowels are now pronounced as front vowels (for example [a], [ɔ], and [ʊ] as [ɛ], [œ], and [ʏ] ).
The sound of a hard g (which often precedes the non-front vowels a o u or a consonant) is usually the voiced velar plosive [ɡ] (as in gain or go) while the sound of a soft g (typically before i , e , or y ) may be a fricative or affricate, depending on the language. In English, the sound of soft g is the affricate / dʒ /, as in general, giant ...