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Silent letters may give an insight into the meaning or origin of a word; e.g., vineyard suggests vines more than the phonetic *vinyard would. Silent letters may help the reader to stress the correct syllable (compare physics to physiques). The final fe in giraffe gives a clue to the second-syllable stress, where *giraf might suggest initial-stress.
This is a list of all the consonants which have a dedicated letter in the International Phonetic Alphabet, plus some of the consonants which require diacritics, ordered by place and manner of articulation.
For example, the initial k is not silent in words such as German Knecht which is a cognate of knight, Knoten which is a cognate of knot, etc. Likewise, g was probably a voiced velar plosive and the initial g was not silent: for example, German Gnom, a cognate of gnome, Gneis, a cognate of gneiss, etc.
Pages in category "Silent letters" The following 6 pages are in this category, out of 6 total. This list may not reflect recent changes. ...
The English language is notorious for its use of silent letters. In fact, about 60 percent of English words contain a silent letter. In many cases, these silent letters actually were pronounced ...
Swahili (missing aspirated consonants, which do not occur in all varieties and anyway are sparsely used) Mongolian (Cyrillic) (apart from letters representing multiple sounds depending on front or back vowels, the soft and hard sign, silent letters to indicate /ŋ/ from /n/ and voiced versus voiceless consonants) Azerbaijani (apart from k)
In English orthography, the letters H, R, W, Y and the digraph GH are used for both consonants and vowels. For instance, the letter Y stands for the consonant/semi-vowel /j/ in y oke , the vowel /ɪ/ in m y th , the vowel /i/ in funn y , the diphthong /aɪ/ in sk y , and forms several digraphs for other diphthongs, such as sa y , bo y , ke y .
In Arabic, the non-hamzated letter ا alif is often a placeholder for an initial vowel. In Javanese script, the letter ꦲ ha is used for a vowel (silent 'h'). In Korean hangul, the zero consonant is ㅇ (이응) ieung. It appears twice in 아음; a-eum, "velar consonant".